How to Plan a Pre-Season

It is mid-July and your players are drifting back. Some have played five-a-side all summer. Some have not run since the final whistle in May. The traditional answer is a month of laps, doggies and bleep tests, on the theory that a proper pre-season should hurt.

Then the season kicks off, half the squad is nursing tight hamstrings, the touch is rusty and everyone has spent four weeks dreading training. Fit, in the narrowest sense. Ready to play football, no.

Knowing how to plan a pre-season solves this. This guide covers what those weeks are actually for, the principles behind a good plan, how professional clubs structure their build-up, a phased progression from our Drill Library, and the mistakes that fill physio rooms in August.

What a pre-season is actually for

A pre-season is a bridge from summer condition to match condition, crossed in planned steps of increasing demand. You are rebuilding three things at once: physical fitness, football sharpness (touch, timing, decisions) and team understanding (how you press, how you build up, who plays where).

The old model treats those as separate jobs. Running in week one, ball work in week three, team shape in the final friendly. Match data says otherwise. Football is an intermittent sprint sport, ninety minutes of walking and jogging interrupted by repeated explosions, and nothing about a steady twenty-minute run prepares a body or a brain for that. The best conditioning tool for football is football, played in doses you control.

Get the plan right and you win the first month of the season before it starts. Teams that arrive fit and organised take points off teams that are only one of the two. Get it wrong and you spend August managing the injuries you caused in July.

The principles

1. Condition with the ball. Almost every physical quality a footballer needs can be trained inside a football practice. A tight rondo is interval training, a counter-pressing game is repeated sprint work, a full-width game is aerobic capacity. Design the practice properly and the fitness arrives for free, along with hundreds of touches and decisions that laps would never provide. Keep running without the ball for the one thing games rarely reach: short doses of straight-line sprinting.

2. Progress the load in phases, not leaps. Bodies adapt to gradual increases and break under sudden ones. Start in small areas at moderate intensity, then grow the pitch size, the bout length and the sprint distances week by week. The working rule: each week slightly harder than the last, and no single session a huge jump from anything the players have done in the previous fortnight.

3. Build match minutes like a staircase. The match is the hardest session of any week, so treat friendly minutes as a dose to be increased gradually: forty-five minutes in the first game, then sixty, then seventy-five, then the full ninety in the final rehearsal. A player's first complete match of the year should happen in pre-season, not on opening day with points at stake.

4. Respect individual starting points. Your squad does not come back as one group. Some trained all summer, some rested completely, one is returning from a spring injury. The keenest player on day one is often the closest to a strain, because enthusiasm and readiness are not the same thing. Give reduced doses to the deconditioned and the returning, and hold the eager ones back from doing everything at full throttle in week one.

What the best clubs do

Elite clubs are useful here because everything they do is measured, so the logic is visible. Players report back in early July for five or six weeks of preparation, and the ball is out on day one. What looks like a casual possession game is a calculated dose: pitch sizes and work-to-rest ratios have been set by sports scientists so the practice produces a precise physical load, which GPS units then verify.

The friendly calendar is a staircase in plain sight. Early fixtures against local or lower-league opposition, often with the squad split into two teams playing forty-five minutes each. Then stronger opponents and longer spells for the starters, with first-choice players reaching ninety minutes only in the final game before the league opener.

Sprinting is dosed just as deliberately. Hamstring injuries cluster around the first maximal sprints after a lay-off, so elite programmes expose players to near top speed in small amounts from the first week rather than saving it for matches. You do not need the GPS to copy any of this. The structure is the point: ball from day one, loads that climb steadily, minutes staged, speed built early.

How to coach it: a session progression

The progression below is built from drills in our Drill Library and maps onto a typical grassroots pre-season of four weeks with two sessions per week. The theme throughout: every physical target hides inside a football practice.

Weeks one and two: volume in small spaces. The 5v2 Basic Rondo is the ideal re-entry point: constant movement, hundreds of passes and aerobic work that accumulates without anyone staring at a stopwatch. Coach pass weight, receiving on the back foot and moving after the pass, and keep bouts short with regular defender rotations so the hardest work is shared. Two or three rondo blocks inside a session quietly deliver the running the old-school coach got from laps, with a summer's rust coming off the touch at the same time.

Week two into three: repeated efforts with a purpose. The Three-Team Counter-Pressing Possession Game raises the intensity a full level. Every loss of possession triggers an immediate sprint to win the ball back, which is precisely the repeated high-intensity effort a match demands. Coach the reaction to the turnover and the work rate of the two nearest players, and let the fitness arrive as a by-product. Manage the dose through bout length: start with two-minute rounds and generous rests, and shorten the recovery as the weeks pass.

Weeks three and four: speed in big spaces. The Four Goal Transition Game stretches play across a bigger area with goals at both ends of both halves, producing long sprints in both directions, changes of direction and decisions taken at speed. This is where your controlled sprint exposure lives. Demand genuine sprints when the moment calls for one, and coach the judgement underneath: when to break quickly and when to slow the game down and keep the ball.

Week four: the full picture. Switch and Score opens up the full width of the pitch and welds conditioning back onto tactics: circulating possession, switching play away from pressure and finishing attacks at the end of long moves. Run it alongside your staged friendlies and you are now training the way you intend to play, at close to match intensity, a week before it counts.

Three mistakes that kill a pre-season

Making week one the hardest week. The beasting session feels like leadership and works like sabotage: the sharpest possible spike in load, applied to bodies six weeks removed from football. The soft-tissue bill arrives in weeks three and four. Flip the plan so week one is the gentlest and the final week the most demanding, which is the direction a bridge is supposed to run.

Leaving sprinting until the first friendly. Small-sided games are superb conditioning but rarely take players near top speed, so a squad can complete three weeks of training without one maximal sprint. The first one then happens chasing a through ball in a friendly, and that is the classic hamstring story. Add short sprint doses, a handful of near full-speed runs, from the first week.

Chasing fitness and forgetting football. A team can finish pre-season superbly conditioned with no idea how it presses, builds up or defends set pieces. Give every session a tactical theme and let the physical work hide inside it. When the fixtures start, organisation wins more points than aerobic capacity.

Adapting it to your level

Youth players do not need a conditioning block at all: most children stay active all summer, and their pre-season is about reconnection, touches and the habits you want to set. Keep it to two or three weeks, make almost everything a small game, and use the time to establish standards and give players clarity about roles. A nine-year-old doing shuttle runs is a warning sign, not a plan.

Adult grassroots teams have a different problem: one or two nights a week, unpredictable attendance and players arriving in wildly different states. Encourage a pre-pre-season habit (a couple of runs and some short sprints before training resumes), make every session game-based so whoever turns up gets conditioned, and hold the line on staged friendly minutes even when players demand the full ninety in game one. They will thank you in September.

The takeaway

Put the ball at the centre of every session. Raise the load in steps, never in leaps. Dose sprinting early and often. Stage friendly minutes so the first full ninety happens before it counts.

For ready-made session plans and a full library of practices to build your pre-season around, explore Coach Notes Pro.