Sport is a sanctuary for ego. It’s one of the few places we’re allowed to have one and, indeed, to celebrate and revel in it.

As long as you’re a player. If you’re one of the high-performance practitioners – the sports scientists, strength & conditioning coaches, nutritionists, physiotherapists and others – your ego is no more appreciated than it would be in any other high-performance workplace. Which means the loudest egos crowd out the best ones.

This is the book sports performance scientist Martin Buchheit needed 20 years ago. His career has been a progression through many of the top teams and institutions in sports and academia. But the conflicts on the field of ego – the internal ones profound, the external ones absurd – left him looking for a way out.

He asked his colleagues if he was the only one, if they’d encountered the same situations and how they kept going with their integrity intact. 110 of them responded to provide an in-depth exploration of ego in high-performance work environments.

Buchheit and George Perry use these stories from the back rooms of professional sports to guide readers from any workplace – sports, tech, finance, medicine – to develop an ego worth celebrating.