I don’t know if you’ve ever been stopped in the street by Scientologists – I tend merely to get legal letters from them – but they are often wielding a distinctive piece of kit. This thing is an e-meter, and they would very much like to hook you up to it. What is an e-meter? An e-meter is a Hubbard electro-psychometer, popularised (though not invented) by Scientology’s founder, L Ron Hubbard.

But what REALLY is an e-meter? Under the bonnet, the device is a ridiculously crude lie detector. Certainly it has needles and dials and whatnot. But compared with the thing you see on Jeremy Kyle, this might as well be made from Lego and horse hair.

Even so, it is able to detect basic electrodermal activity if you hold on to its two tin cans. Scientology harvesters of secrets – or “auditors”, as the Church prefers it – use it to monitor a subject’s responses when they ask a series of questions. When you are audited, they can see your thoughts or something, and the cure for your problems is often to spend more, expensive time hooked up to an e-meter. According to published Scientology catalogues, the 2013 e-meter model was priced at $5,000 – and beyond even that there is a Limited-Edition Mark Ultra VIII Golden Age of Tech III E-meter, which is marked with my three least favourite words in a retail setting: price on application.

Still, as someone always on the lookout for the post-journalism get-rich-quick scheme, I am highly taken with creating a similar device – and what better hunting ground than top-flight football? I believe I have identified perhaps the last gap in the modern game’s almost comically technicalised market. How about a try-meter – a totally scientific device that could be marketed to football clubs as a means of measuring that most emotive of issues, that last elusive variable: how much players are “trying”.

Listen to talk radio or social media or even Alan Shearer, and it’s clear that for all your heatmaps and your player run comparisons and your marginal gains, when the chips are down there is an awful lot of falling back on the old “not trying” explanation. In the year 2017, it seems unbelievable that this metric has not yet been targeted by some charlatan or other. Still, if it falls to me.

In the great scheme of pseudoscientific devices, my try-meter would err towards the victimless. I’d definitely find it far easier to sleep at night than the chap who repackaged £13 novelty golf ball finders and sold them as bomb detectors in Iraq and elsewhere for up to £27,000 each.

No, the try-meter would be a gentler form of pseudoscience – certainly no more cobblers-driven than Sam Allardyce’s Crystal Palace programme notes, which last weekend claimed: “The increase in performance doesn’t have to be that big. If you put two per cent on every player, that’s an overall 22% increase in how you play.” Never mind marginal gains – think of Big Sam’s theory as marginal brains. Is it bollocks? Course it is. But nobody died.

My first sales target for the try-meter would be Leicester City Football Club. Leicester are the latest footballing entity to be accused of not trying. The whole of last season’s spellbinding run, they tried their noble hearts out, and now they’re not trying any more. Or rather, they weren’t till Monday. It’s that simple.

You can tell, innit, because when Claudio Ranieri got the chop and everyone criticised them instead of him for it, they came out and beat Liverpool. Ha! Hoist by their own trying. Tricked into trying by people who knew they weren’t trying before – people who are now even more outraged than they were when Leicester weren’t trying last week. (What’s that you say? Liverpool just didn’t turn up to the game? Well in that case, I have a product I would like to show their executive in charge of strategic purchasing.)

And yet, and yet … is it time to retire the “not-trying” analysis, as being so obviously rudimentary as to be meaningless? It feels closely related to that other old chestnut – “passion”. England are a case in point. No one is accused of “not trying” more frequently than the England football side (see also: “lacking passion”). This may seem to you a suspiciously simplistic explanation, particularly having watched games in which the England shirt itself appears to function as a kind of psychological straitjacket for players who perform excellently at club level. To anyone who has trailed round after England for the past however many international tournaments, it is perfectly obvious that the problem is slightly more psychiatrically complex than “not trying”. You could have a week-long symposium at one of the better schools of Viennese analysis and still not get to the bottom of it.

None of which is to blame those who fall back on accusations of “not trying” in the absence of having a better clue. We all have stories we need to tell ourselves, and for all their veneration of method, football clubs themselves ricochet between science and emotion far more than they pretend.

Last week it was revealed that the Sunderland squad had been taken on a trip to New York just days before the club announced redundancies at its training ground and stadium. I’m sure the powers that be at Sunderland could do you up a PowerPoint with graphs and pie charts featuring words like “spirit” and “bonding” with actual numbers next to them (and that it would be a lot of consolation to the staff being encouraged to pop their redundancy forms in to HR).

But it’s not a whole lot more than a confused stab in the dark – and like “not trying”, should realistically be recognised as such.