Supplements: What Young Goalkeepers Need, and What They Are Being Sold

A 15-year-old keeper showed me a tub last season and asked if he should be taking it. I read the label. There were nineteen ingredients on it and I could not tell him what half of them were for. Neither could the label.

That is the honest starting point for this conversation. The supplement aisle is aimed squarely at young athletes and their parents, and it is largely selling certainty about things that are not certain.

Let me be clear about my role here. I am a goalkeeper coach, not a doctor and not a dietitian. Nothing below is medical advice, and anything you or your keeper actually takes should go past a physician or a registered dietitian first -- especially under 18.

Rule one: supplements supplement

The word means "in addition to." Not instead of. A supplement is designed to fill a gap in an otherwise decent diet.

The keepers who ask me about protein powder are almost never keepers with a protein problem. They are keepers with a breakfast problem, or a sleep problem, or a we-eat-dinner-at-ten-o-clock problem. Powder does not fix any of those. It just makes an expensive version of the same week.

So the first question is never "what should I take." It is "am I eating enough, often enough, and sleeping enough?" If the answer is no, start there, because nothing in a tub will out-perform fixing it.

What the industry is not required to tell you

This is the part that matters most and gets discussed least. In the United States, dietary supplements are not approved by the FDA before they go on sale the way medicines are. Manufacturers are responsible for their own product safety and label accuracy, and enforcement mostly happens after something goes wrong.

The practical consequence: what is in the tub is not guaranteed to be what is on the label. Independent testing has repeatedly found products contaminated with ingredients that were never listed -- sometimes stimulants, sometimes anabolic agents.

For a recreational adult that is a health question. For your keeper it can also be an eligibility question. The NCAA holds athletes strictly responsible for everything in their bodies, and "it was in my supplement and not on the label" has ended careers. If your keeper has any hope of playing in college, this alone is a reason to be extremely conservative.

If a supplement is going to be used, third-party certification is the minimum bar. Look for NSF Certified for Sport or Informed Sport on the packaging. That does not make a product effective. It makes it more likely that what is inside matches the label.

The short, unglamorous list

Things a doctor might genuinely identify a need for. Iron and vitamin D are the two that come up most often with young athletes, and both are properly identified by a blood test, not by a guess or a YouTube video. Do not supplement either on a hunch -- too much iron in particular is not harmless.

Protein powder. It is food in a convenient shape. It is not magic and it is not necessary if food is being eaten. Where I have seen it genuinely help is a keeper with a brutal schedule who cannot get a real meal in after a late session. That is a convenience problem being solved conveniently, which is a fair use.

Sports drinks. Not a supplement exactly, but worth saying: in a long, hot Florida tournament day, a drink with carbohydrate and electrolytes has a real job. On a 45-minute training night in November, it is a soda with better marketing.

Creatine. The most studied performance supplement there is, and I am not going to pretend the research is weak, because it is not. I am also not going to recommend it to minors. Major sports medicine bodies have long advised against routine creatine use in athletes under 18, largely because the long-term research in growing bodies is thin. If your keeper is over 18 and asking, that is a conversation for them and a physician or dietitian -- not for their goalkeeper coach and not for a message board.

What I tell keepers to avoid outright

Anything sold on how it makes you feel rather than what it does. Pre-workouts marketed to teenagers are stimulant products, and a jittery goalkeeper is a worse goalkeeper -- this position is decided by calm reads and clean hands, not by being wired.

Anything promising fat loss, "test support," or muscle gain that sounds like a shortcut. Those categories have the worst contamination record in the industry, by a distance.

Anything a keeper is taking without a parent knowing about it.

The honest summary

In twelve years as a professional across seven countries, I never once saw a supplement turn an average goalkeeper into a good one. I saw sleep do it. I saw food do it. I saw a keeper who kept a notebook and fixed the same mistake twice do it.

If the food side of the house is not in order yet, start there -- that is exactly the ground 90 Minute Nutrition covers, and it is a far better first investment than anything in a tub. Then, if there is still a genuine gap, take that specific question to a doctor.

Boring wins. It always has.