The balanced picture. The NIH's National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH massage overview) summarizes the condition-specific evidence: benefits tend to be short-term, and study quality is often low. For example, reviews found low-strength evidence for chronic low-back pain, and massage performed better than doing nothing for neck and shoulder pain but not clearly better than other active treatments. The same source rates the overall risk of harm from massage as low.
Pain is not the same as function. In a randomized trial of 60 male amateur athletes with exercise-induced muscle soreness (Angelopoulos et al., Healthcare 2022), sports massage combined with cold-water immersion reduced pain versus control over 72 hours — but neither intervention improved strength, range of motion or other functional measures. That distinction is exactly how massage is framed here: a reasonable tool for comfort and soreness, not a claim of faster healing, injury prevention or faster sprinting.