Charlie Austin reveals 'horrendous' thing Middlesbrough did to away players at Riverside | OneFootball

The former Southampton and QPR striker has theory on how Middlesbrough tried to gain a small advantage over their rivals through their decorating.

The former Southampton, Burnley and QPR striker has a theory on how Middlesbrough tried to get a small advantage over visitors to The Riverside Stadium through a somewhat unusual means.

There are two fundamental truisms about football which can cause clubs to act in a slightly strange way from time to time. Firstly, professional football is a game of fine margins, with a lot at stake. Nowhere is this truer than in the Championship, where the 46-game season often comes down to one or two results to decide promotion or relegation.

And secondly, home advantage is real. It's a common trait of league tables around the world that clubs win more games at their own grounds, from the very top of the professional game, all the way to the bottom of the semi-professional game. A multitude of different reasons have been given for this - and it's been on decline in recent years - but the fact that it still exists isn't in doubt.

The upshot of the conflation of these two truisms is that there is every incentive for a home club to make an away team's visit uncomfortable, and some of the tactics that have been used to do this in the past have bordered on the bizarre, from cutting the grass to suit a home team's game to making sure that access to hot water in the away changing room is limited.

Charlie Austin believes that Middlesbrough's away changing room was meant to make visiting players feel nauseous

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The former Southampton, Burnley and Queens Park Rangers striker Charlie Austin has a theory on how one club may have tried to make visiting players feel a bit queasy before matches.

Speaking on his podcast, he claimed that Middlesbrough may have made the interior decor of their away changing room deliberately nauseating for the opposition. "I don't know if Middlesbrough have changed, but in their away dressing room they have got the worst tiles in there. I want to say they're cream and green, and I think it's to remind away players that they're not feeling very well a feeling of being sick, I think that's what it tries to do."

"When I was last there", he continued, "that's what the tile colour, but it didn't work because we won!" Austin's co-host, who has connections to the club, claimed in reply that he would find out whether that was actually the reason for this particular colour scheme.

This picture from Getty Images in 2017 seems to indicate that Austin's recollection of the decor is correct, though whether this had any effect on any other players is not recorded.

Clubs have long used the "dark arts" to maximise home advantage

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A 2026 study into Europe's "Big Five" leagues and home advantage showed that home advantage is real, and that the figures across leagues and countries are remarkably similar.

This study showed four broad reasons why this might be: crowd support and referee influence, travel fatigue, familiarity with pitch and conditions, and psychological factors. And amongst those "psychological factors" it notes that "away dressing room environments are often deliberately made less comfortable."

An article in Tribuna published in November 2025 detailed some of the ways in which clubs have sought to gain an extra advantage through making away dressing rooms less comfortable than their home ones. These include Norwich City painting the away dressing room pink "to supposedly lower testosterone", with other clubs taking advantage of different sizes and shapes of the rooms concerned, and even hot water not being made available.

The EFL's rulebook has minimum standards that changing rooms have to meet under their rule 18. Amongst the requirements are that each room must be 30m² and each dressing room must have either a shower area comprising at least six shower units or six separate baths.

They are also required to have four toilet units, two wash basins, a massage table; a fridge, a tactical board; and a working double plug socket. The rules make no requirement for hot water, though they do stipulate that, "All dressing rooms must be heated, well ventilated, have non-slip floors, be free from damp and secure."

The former Cambridge manager John Beck pushed these "dark arts" as far as he was able to

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Perhaps the most infamous of the managers who sought to make life difficult for away teams was the former Cambridge United manager John Beck, whose team came within a whisker of making it into the top-flight in the early 1990s.

Among Beck's tactics were keeping the grass in the corners of the Abbey Stadium's pitch long in order to make it more difficult for opposing teams to clear the ball - Beck's team played a long-ball game, so this was less of an issue for them - and flooding the away changing room hours before a match to make it damp and inhospitable for opponents.

The latter of these tactics is now specifically outlawed by EFL rules, though they have nothing to say what colour the tiles in an away team's changing room should be. It should also be added that, if a club really rendered the facilities for an away team so bad that they had a huge effect, they could be charged under similar rules regarding acting in "utmost good faith" to those which caught Southampton out over Spygate at the end of the 2025-26 EFL season.

But clubs have long understood that there's no need to have a huge effect. In this game of fine margins, just the tiniest little inconvenience could make enough of a difference to benefit them. It is possible that Charlie Austin is being unfair on Middlesbrough, and that the choice of tile colour was not made on the basis of upsetting the stomachs of away players, though given the lengths that some clubs have gone to in order to unsettle away teams in the past, it can't be completely ruled out.