Preseason: What Are We Actually Preparing For?
Updated: Oct 16
Every season begins the same way. Preseason has something of the first day at school about it. Everyone arrives with good intentions, the timetable looks manageable on paper, and there is a general belief that this year will be better organised than the last. Four to six weeks later the squad is meant to be ready for ten months of football.
This belief has a cost. Lower limb injuries have been shown to peak in July, during football preseason preparation (Ekstrand et al., 2011), and training injury incidence rises again in the opening quarter of the season, linked to carry-over from the raised volume and intensity of the preparatory phase (Leventer et al., 2019). Players exposed to sudden, rapid increases in high speed and sprint running have greater odds of lower limb injury (Malone et al., 2018). Across four countries and fifteen years of experience in professional football, I have watched what follows look remarkably similar in all of them. The window does not change, so the work gets compressed into it.
Does preseason prepare players physically, tactically and mentally for the whole ten month season? No. Even with the best intentions, six weeks cannot make a player football-fit for ten months of unpredictable events such as injuries, transfers, managerial change, personal matters. None of it can be prepared for in July.
So if preseason does not prepare players for the season, what does it prepare them for?
It is a period of assessment, planning and preparation. It establishes player health and physical status. It lays the physical, tactical and collective foundations on which everything later is built. And it prepares the squad for the opening weeks. The distinction sounds pedantic until you watch what happens to a plan written as though ten months were knowable from a testing battery in week six.
Six Weeks Preseason: What Does That Actually Get You?
Meckel and colleagues (2018) tested eighteen professional players before preseason, after preseason and at mid season. Aerobic capacity improved across preseason (52.7 to 56.4 mL/kg/min), and vertical jump improved (37.0 to 39.0 cm). Neither changed meaningfully after that, between the end of preseason and the middle of the competitive period. Repeated sprint indices deteriorated across preseason, which the authors attributed to accumulated load rather than to any loss of capacity.
Two things follow. Preseason is when most of the measurable physical change happens. But the 56.4 mL/kg/min is not something the player now owns permanently; it is something currently maintained, and it falls when the stimulus that produced it changes. Physical qualities decay at different rates, none of them long enough to carry a player unattended from August to May. Every practitioner has presented a week-six number in a meeting. It impresses the room, goes in the report, and by October is rarely mentioned again.
So six weeks ends with a squad in condition to start. Whether those numbers still hold in March depends on what is trained between August and May, not on what was trained in July. Maintaining a quality costs less than building one, which is what makes it possible at all once the fixtures take over the calendar.
This also resolves an apparent contradiction. Ekstrand and colleagues (2020) found that teams completing more training sessions during preseason carried lower in season injury burden. What accumulates across those sessions is not a fitness peak to be held until May. It is exposure: a body progressively loaded, and a staff that has had time to work out what each player needs. Preseason influences the season through readiness, not through a maintained peak.
"Does preseason prepare players physically, tactically and mentally for the whole ten month season? No. Even with the best intentions, six weeks cannot make a player football-fit for ten months of unpredictable events such as injuries, transfers, managerial change, personal matters. None of it can be prepared for in July."
What the Plan Cannot Anticipate
The second problem is that a preseason plan cannot anticipate what the season will look like. Nor can it anticipate how the squad will respond to what the season brings.
Fixture congestion sits on the calendar months in advance, yet muscle injury rates rise with it (Bengtsson et al., 2013). Nobody in July knows which players will be affected. Teams without a winter break lose an average of 303 more player days per season to injury than teams with one (Ekstrand et al., 2019b). Replacing the head coach happens roughly every second season, and when a new coach arrives with their own backroom staff, hamstring injury burden increases (Ekstrand et al., 2023). A transfer window closes in September and reopens in January. A losing run. And in February a player's family member becomes ill, which appears in no plan, in no dataset, and changes everything for that player.
A preseason designed to deliver season wide readiness and fitness is designed against a season that does not exist. The season that does exist is a sequence of disruptions with football played in between, and the only sensible response to that is a foundation built to be adapted rather than a peak built to be defended.
Preparation, Assessment and Planning
Preparation. The main goal is laying foundations: the physical base developed at the only point in the calendar where training rather than competition drives the content; the tactical principles installed while there is still time; the cohesion of a group that has changed since May, with arrivals and departures among players and often staff.
That preparation is for the opening fixtures specifically, not for the season, but for the four to six weeks in which the group is asked to compete before anything has settled.
Assessment. None of that foundation work can be designed without knowing each player's health and physical status. The assessment builds a profile for every individual in the squad, and the profile is what gives the staff a working understanding of what each player needs.
It is worth acknowledging what this assessment can and cannot do. The profession has a tendency to oversell it. Hughes and colleagues (2020) had what most departments would consider an ideal dataset: five seasons of preseason screening at an elite club, a full battery of strength, flexibility and functional measures, modelling done properly. The resulting model still could not separate the players who went on to sustain a muscle injury from those who did not. Screening earns its place by detecting relevant pathology and by guiding rehabilitation and performance work, not by predicting injury. It tells you where to start each player, which is exactly what you need in July.
Planning. Those profiles then have to become a timeline. The assessment produces a list of deficits across the squad; the plan decides which of them get addressed in the coming weeks, which are carried into the competitive season, in what order, and for whom.
That is where most of the difficulty sits. A squad of twenty-five arrives with twenty-five different starting points, and the deficits do not share a timescale. Some can be moved inside a fortnight. Some take a full block and will not be finished by the opening fixture. Some belong to the season rather than to July, and the honest decision is to schedule them there rather than compress them into a window that cannot hold them. Attempting everything at once is precisely how the load spike described earlier is created.
Verheijen (2014) has made a version of this argument for years. A quick build-up produces short-term fitness, carries fatigue into preseason itself and leaves the team vulnerable later. A gradual one arrives at a comparable level without that cost. Intensity should still be introduced, but progressively, with recovery built into the structure, so the player starts the season ready rather than already depleted.
A plan built this way carries a sequence rather than a peak, and it assumes from the outset that it will be interrupted.
The Blind Spot
Preseason should also be when alignment within the structure is set. How stakeholders communicate with each other. What our standards are. What our team values are, and how our decision making should hold up under pressure. The preseason sets the tone.
Every department arrives in July with a plan for the players. Very few arrive with a plan for themselves. The meeting about how the staff will work together is the one meeting nobody schedules.
King and colleagues (2024) ran focus groups with twenty eight practitioners in high performance sport. Information emerged as something traded rather than shared, held or released according to individual judgement about what colleagues needed to know. Ego, unclear roles and the fear of being challenged surfaced repeatedly as blockers. Practitioners wanted psychological safety and reported working in environments that rarely provided it.
The cost of that is better documented than most people assume. Ekstrand et al., (2019a) surveyed medical staff across elite clubs in seventeen countries and found that where communication between the head coach and the medical team was poor, injury burden was higher, severe injuries were more frequent, and players trained and played less. That sits alongside the staffing finding already mentioned, where instability among head staff was associated with increased hamstring injury burden across the season.
How the people in the building talk to each other and collaborate shows up in how often the players are on the pitch. It is a hard variable that is uncomfortable to measure and expensive to ignore.
The staff deserve the same treatment as the squad, and it has to be built in July. Assess where the working relationships actually stand rather than assuming they are fine. Agree how disagreement will be handled, who decides what, and what information moves between departments as a matter of course rather than on request. Write it down, put those conversations in the preseason schedule alongside the sessions, and rehearse a scenario: what happens if we lose three centre backs in one week. A department that has not done this before the first fixture will do it later, under pressure, with results on the line.
This alignment is not a soft extra. It is the mechanism that allows the foundation built in preseason to remain flexible once the season begins to disrupt the plan.
The Season Builds the Footballer
Preseason develops the base. The season builds the footballer.
What does builds mean here? Not physical development in the straightforward sense. Meckel and colleagues (2018) showed physical qualities holding rather than climbing once the fixtures begin. Silva and colleagues (2011) found that individual match playing time influenced fitness related parameters, though the direction is ambiguous: does playing improve fitness, or do fitter players get more playing time?
The more defensible claim is that the season builds match fitness, a multifactorial quality sitting at the intersection of physical capacity, football skill, tactical understanding, emotional state and whatever we mean by robustness. Every test in the battery captures a fragment of it. None captures the quality itself. The only test that assesses all of it at once is the match, and the more you play the more the quality improves, not because your VO2 max climbs but because applying that capacity in context becomes more automatic and less costly.
This matters for preseason design. If match fitness can only be built in matches, preseason should not try to replicate it. It should build the physical and tactical foundation that makes match exposure survivable, and let the season provide the exposure.
None of this means preseason exposure is irrelevant. Windt and colleagues (2017) sharpen the point at individual level in elite rugby league, where ten additional preseason sessions were associated with a 17% reduction in injury risk. What is being counted is sessions completed, not test scores. What matters is not how long preseason runs but how much of it a player gets through, and that is a planning problem rather than a calendar one.
The season is where the plan meets events nobody could schedule. That places a demand on what preseason built: a foundation flexible enough for players whose bodies must absorb whatever the fixtures dictate, and for staff who have to reorganise around a squad that no longer looks like the one they prepared.
Solid Enough to Hold, Flexible Enough to Adapt
Preseason should build a foundation solid enough to hold and flexible enough to adapt when the unpredictable arrives. Buildings in earthquake zones are designed on the same principle. They survive by moving, not by resisting.
Flexibility is not a disposition, it is a loop. Look at what the plan produced, compare it against what you expected, change what you control. The controllable variables are fewer than the dashboard suggests: what each player is exposed to, in what order, and how quickly the group notices it needs to change course. That last one is not a monitoring problem. It is the alignment problem from earlier, arriving with a scoreline attached.
That changes what preseason is judged on. Not a set of scores from a testing battery in week six, but the state of the squad entering the opening weeks and the quality of the foundation underneath. It means treating assessment as orientation rather than prediction. It means scheduling honestly, so that what cannot be built by August is carried into the autumn instead of compressed into July. And it means giving the alignment of the staff the same seriousness as the running.
So here is what I am still working out. If preseason is judged on the opening weeks and on the durability of what it leaves behind, what would you change about how you design yours?
What This Looks Like in Practice
If preseason is judged on the opening weeks and on the durability of what it leaves behind, a few concrete shifts follow:
Treat the testing battery as orientation, not to claim foresight about who will get injured.
Decide explicitly which deficits belong to the preseason window and which will be carried into the competitive period. Protect progressive loading rather than chasing a single week-six peak.
Schedule staff-alignment work alongside the training sessions. Rehearse disruption scenarios before the first competitive fixture.
Measure success by readiness for the opening block and by the system’s capacity to adapt once the season begins to diverge from the plan.
We do not prepare players for the season. We prepare them to start it.
If preseason is judged on the opening weeks and on the durability of what it leaves behind, what would you change about how you design yours?
---
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: If preseason cannot make players fit for the whole season, what should it actually be judged on?
It should be judged on the state of the squad entering the opening block of fixtures and on the durability of the foundation it leaves behind, rather than on a set of scores from a testing battery in week six. Those two criteria are assessable within a few weeks of the first competitive match, whereas season-wide readiness is not something a six-week window can deliver in the first place. A useful secondary measure is how much of the planned work each individual player actually completed, since exposure accumulated across sessions is what appears to carry over into the season. Judged this way, a preseason that ends with modest test numbers but a fully participating squad may be more successful than one that produces impressive figures at the cost of missed sessions.
Q: How long do the physical gains made during preseason last once the competitive season begins?
The evidence suggests they do not so much last as require maintaining. Meckel and colleagues (2018) found that aerobic capacity and vertical jump improved across preseason in eighteen professional players and then changed very little between the end of the preparatory phase and mid-season, which indicates a plateau rather than continued development. A quality such as a 56.4 mL/kg/min aerobic capacity is better understood as a state currently sustained by an ongoing stimulus than as a property the player now holds. It declines when that stimulus changes, and different qualities decay at different rates, none of them slow enough to carry a player unattended from August to May.
Q: Does preseason screening predict which players will get injured?
On current evidence, no. Hughes and colleagues (2020) developed and internally validated a prognostic model using five seasons of preseason screening at an elite club, with a full battery of strength, flexibility and functional measures, and the resulting model still could not separate the players who went on to sustain an indirect muscle injury from those who did not. This is not an argument against screening, which earns its place by detecting relevant pathology and by guiding rehabilitation and performance work. It is an argument for treating the assessment as orientation — a description of where each player is starting from — rather than as prediction.
Q: If teams that complete more preseason sessions have fewer in-season injuries, why not simply train more in July? Because what appears to matter is sessions completed by the individual player, not total volume imposed on the squad. Ekstrand and colleagues (2020) reported lower in-season injury burden in teams completing more preseason training, and Windt and colleagues (2017) found in elite rugby league that ten additional preseason sessions were associated with roughly a 17% reduction in injury risk at individual level. Compressing more work into the same window tends to reduce completed sessions rather than increase them, since sudden increases in high-speed and sprint running are themselves associated with greater odds of lower-limb injury (Malone et al., 2018). The practical implication is to protect progressive loading and participation, and to carry into the competitive period whatever cannot be built by August.
Q: What does planning for the staff, rather than only for the players, look like in practice?
It means scheduling the alignment work alongside the training sessions and treating it with the same seriousness. Concretely: assessing where the working relationships actually stand instead of assuming they are functional; agreeing in advance how disagreement will be handled, who holds which decision, and what information moves between departments as a matter of course rather than on request; writing those agreements down; and rehearsing a disruption scenario before the first competitive fixture. The rationale is not cultural but operational — Ekstrand and colleagues (2019a) found that poor communication between the head coach and the medical team was associated with higher injury burden, more severe injuries and reduced training and playing time across elite clubs in seventeen countries. A department that has not had these conversations in July will have them later, under pressure and with results on the line.
References
Bengtsson, H., Ekstrand, J., & Hägglund, M. (2013) 'Muscle injury rates in professional football increase with fixture congestion: An 11-year follow-up of the UEFA Champions League injury study', British Journal of Sports Medicine, 47(12), 743-747.
Ekstrand, J., Hägglund, M., & Waldén, M. (2011) 'Injury incidence and injury patterns in professional football: The UEFA injury study', British Journal of Sports Medicine, 45(7), 553-558.
Ekstrand, J., Lundqvist, D., Davison, M., D'Hooghe, M., & Pensgaard, A. M. (2019a) 'Communication quality between the medical team and the head coach/manager is associated with injury burden and player availability in elite football clubs', British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53(5), 304-308.
Ekstrand, J., Spreco, A., & Davison, M. (2019b) 'Elite football teams that do not have a winter break lose on average 303 player-days more per season to injuries than those teams that do: A comparison among 35 professional European teams', British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53, 1231-1235.
Ekstrand, J., Spreco, A., Windt, J., & Khan, K. M. (2020) 'Are elite soccer teams' preseason training sessions associated with fewer in-season injuries? A 15-year analysis from the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Elite Club Injury Study', American Journal of Sports Medicine, 48(3), 723-729.
Ekstrand, J., Van Zoest, W., & Gauffin, H. (2023) 'Changes in head staff members in male elite-level football teams are associated with increased hamstring injury burden for that season: The UEFA Elite Club Injury Study', BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine, 9(4), Article e001640.
Hughes, T., Riley, R. D., Callaghan, M. J., & Sergeant, J. C. (2020) 'The value of preseason screening for injury prediction: The development and internal validation of a multivariable prognostic model to predict indirect muscle injury risk in elite football (soccer) players', Sports Medicine Open, 6(1), Article 22.
King, R., Yiannaki, C., Kiely, J., Rhodes, D., & Alexander, J. (2024) 'Multi-disciplinary teams in high performance sport, the what and the how: A utopian view or a darker reality', Journal of Expertise, 7(4), 149-174.
Leventer, L., Eek, F., & Lames, M. (2019) 'Intra-seasonal variation of injury patterns among German Bundesliga soccer players', Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 22(6), 661-666.
Malone, S., Owen, A., Mendes, B., Hughes, B., Collins, K., & Gabbett, T. J. (2018) 'High-speed running and sprinting as an injury risk factor in soccer: Can well-developed physical qualities reduce the risk?', Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 21(3), 257-262.
Meckel, Y., Doron, O., Eliakim, E., & Eliakim, A. (2018) 'Seasonal variations in physical fitness and performance indices of elite soccer players', Sports, 6(1), Article 14.
Silva, J. R., Magalhães, J. F., Ascensão, A. A., Oliveira, E. M., Seabra, A. F., & Rebelo, A. N. (2011) 'Individual match playing time during the season affects fitness-related parameters of male professional soccer players', Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 25(10), 2729-2739.
Verheijen, R. (2014). Football periodisation part 1. World Football Academy.
Windt, J., Gabbett, T. J., Ferris, D., & Khan, K. M. (2017) 'Training load injury paradox: Is greater preseason participation associated with lower in-season injury risk in elite rugby league players?', British Journal of Sports Medicine, 51(8), 645-650.
Dr. Rudy Kalema is a sport scientist and performance strategist with over 15 years of experience across professional football clubs, universities, and sport technology companies. He has served as Head of Physical Performance in professional football, and now works at the intersection of applied practice, sport science and technology, translating data into decisions practitioners can act on. He holds a PhD in biomechanics from Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia) and an MSc in Exercise Science from the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), and has authored and co-authored multiple peer reviewed publications in sport medicine, sport science and sport technology.
Comments