Prediction: the modern day sports science/medicine 'quest for the Holy Grail'

In high performance sport, science and medicine practitioners employ a variety of physical and psychological tests, training/match monitoring and injury screening tools for a variety of reasons; mainly to predict performance, identify talented individuals and flag when an injury will occur. The ability to 'predict' outcomes such as performance, talent or injury is arguably the sports science/medicine modern day equivalent of the 'Quest for the Holy Grail'. The purpose of this invited commentary is to 1) highlight the common misinterpretation of studies investigating association to those actually analysing prediction and 2) provide practitioners with simple recommendations to quickly distinguish between methods pertaining to association and those of prediction.