## 1 Introduction  
The pursuit of nutritional strategies to enhance athletic performance has long been a source of interest for scientists and athletes alike [1]. From this perspective, nutraceuticalals have recently emerged as a subject of interest. Nutraceuticalals are bioactive compounds that can be found in foods or in supplements that serve as a link between nutrition and medicine, mainly aimed at 'prevention'. This syncretic neologism, coined by Dr. [PERSON] in 1989, combines nutrition and pharmaceutical [2]. Nutraceuticalals encompass substances such as vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other natural compounds, such as lycopene from tomatoes, omega-3 fatty acids from oily fish, and flavanols from dark chocolate (DC) [3]. Each of these substances has significant biological potential. Plants, herbs, and other natural products have been used as therapeutic agents since ancient times. It has been established that a considerable number of the effects attributed to plants used in traditional medicines in the past can be ascribed to nutraceuticalal compounds. Among soccer players, the use of dietary supplements has become increasingly common, with most athletes including them into their routines with different purposes like enhancing performance, reducing the risk of injury, or accelerating post-exercise recovery [4; 5]. The use of dietary supplements, when integrated into a context of proper nutrition, can indeed be highly effective and lead to competitive advantages for athletes. However, it is common for athletes to use supplements without a genuine understanding of both their positive and negative effects and without exploring the possibility of achieving the same benefits through diet alone [6; 7; 8]. In addition, within sports societies, there is often a lack of specialized professionals capable of adequately managing athletes' nutrition. Even when such figures are present, their attention is primarily focused on the first-team athletes, while youth teams may be neglected. For this reason, youth teams often find themselves at the mercy of unqualified individuals or ambitious parents who, hoping to foster the emergence of promising young athletes in such a competitive environment, introduce dietary supplements to improve their performance instead of improving their nutrition [9]. Moreover, in the context of youth teams, decisions are often based on anecdotal information and lack of scientific foundation. This can be extremely detrimental both because dietary supplements can have significant side effects if not taken properly, and because young athletes are not educated about proper nutrition, conveying the message that there are \"shortcuts\" capable of providing what they need. In this context, identifying functional foods with ergogenic effects could be an alternative and healthy strategy [10]. Functional foods provide additional health benefits beyond basic nutrition with the aim of maintaining good health and reducing the risk of disease. To be called \"functional\", their positive influence on one or more physiological functions must be scientifically proven. Among the different functional foods rich in bioactive substances investigated for their potential ergogenic benefits, dark chocolate has emerged as a promising candidate [11]. The potential ergogenic effect of dark chocolate is attributable to cocoa that contains several bioactive compounds, including polyphenols (mainly (\(-\))-epicatechin and (\(+\))-catechin, and proanthocyanidins), methylxanthines such as theobromine and caffeine, and some psychoactive constituents such as biogenic amines (tyramine, tryptamine, and especially phenylethylamine) and the endocannabinoids anandamide and related N-acyclethanolamines [12]. The concentration of bioactive compounds varies significantly between cocoa, chocolate, and different types of chocolate. Most of the health benefits of cocoa and its products are attributed to its polyphenol content, with dark chocolate containing up to five times more polyphenols than milk chocolate.