Why do footballers not drink water?

A physio jogs to the touchline, holds out a bottle, and the player squirts a mouthful in, swills it around, and spits it onto the grass. From the stands or on television it can look like the player is refusing to drink. They are not. They are drinking — just not swallowing.

The most straightforward explanation is that the player simply does not need water at that moment. In cold conditions the body loses less fluid through sweat, and a player who arrived at the match well-hydrated may genuinely have no need to top up. Taking a bottle, rinsing, and spitting is a way to acknowledge the offer without taking on fluid they do not want.

The more specific reason — and the one that explains a pattern you will notice across a whole squad on certain matchdays — is the Ramadan fast. Muslim players observing Ramadan do not eat or drink between dawn and sunset, which means a match played during daylight hours falls inside the fasting window. Rather than swallow water and break the fast, these players take water into their mouth and spit it out. The mouth and throat get some relief from the dryness of playing at full intensity, but the fast stays intact.

This is not a workaround unique to football. The practice of rinsing without swallowing has a long history in Islamic tradition and is widely accepted among scholars as compatible with fasting. On the pitch it means a player can still interact with the hydration routine — taking a bottle at a stoppage, using the break to reset mentally — without crossing the line the fast draws.

There is also a separate, purely physical reason some players rinse and spit even outside Ramadan. Research into sports performance has found that swilling a carbohydrate drink and spitting it out can still give the body a brief signal that energy is incoming, which some players and coaching staff find useful late in a match. Whether individual players are doing this deliberately or simply out of habit varies, and clubs rarely explain their hydration choices publicly.

So when a player appears to refuse water, the likeliest explanations are: they rinsed and spat rather than swallowed, they are observing a fast, or they were already well-hydrated and had no need. A player genuinely avoiding water for no reason is the rarest version of what you are seeing.