The myth of Preseason

Fans, the media, and managers all love to sell the power of preseason. But the modern version offers far less than they claim

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It’s a phrase we’ve heard plenty of times before. He just needs a proper preseason with the squad. This could apply to a coach, or even a young player still trying to figure out the ways of senior football.

Needing a proper preseason is one of the oft used cliches in a sport that’s filled with them. It is, like most cliches in football, designed to sell you hope. The hope that better days are right around the corner.

We know that wages account for about 70 percent of the variance in league position. The impact of the manager is only somewhere in that remaining 30 percent. But when a team starts the season out poorly what happens? You can’t change the players in November so you change the coach. Then you can sell it to your fans that the new coach will turn things around, inspire the players more, or just they needed a new voice. All these things are designed to sell fans the idea that changing one man will turn around the fortunes of the team and they should continue buying tickets and supporting the club.

Preseason has become the ultimate selling point. We need to give the manager a proper preseason so he could really work and implement ideas. Just give him a preseason to work on the team’s fitness levels. We talk about preseason like it’s this magical thing that could completely transform a team. As if it’s this long period where the manager has uninterrupted time with the players and without it it’s impossible to cohesively build a winning team.

It is, of course, all bullshit. The idea that modern preseasons have a major impact is entirely a myth.

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Football is a constantly evolving game played before fans and a media that have deep beliefs that are not evolving at nearly the same rate. We still think preseason is a crucial time because at one point in time it was really important!

Let’s go back to the creation of the Premier League in the early 90s. Manchester United’s final match of the 1991-92 season took place on May 2nd, followed by friendlies on May 3rd and May 8th. That was it for the season.

The players had nearly the entire month of May plus the entire month of June off before the entire squad reconvened in July for preseason. They trained for a few weeks then played their first friendly on July 28th, 79 days after their last match.

The preseason was important for two reasons. The first and ever present reason, to sell tickets. Depending on how you view the world you can say the second reason was to protect players from themselves, or so that clubs could have better control of their players. Two months off is a long time and back then players didn’t take care of their bodies the way they do now.

Footballers weren’t exactly in shape back then¹ but give them two months off and they could fall much more out of shape very quickly. They needed weeks of sessions to regain their fitness levels though training sessions that back then were not notoriously difficult. It was more of the element of at least if you’re here on the training pitch then you’re not off somewhere drinking.

The important aspect of preseason back then was you had your entire squad with you the entire time.

Euro 92 took place that summer but that was an eight team tournament, which meant far fewer international commitments. Not that it really mattered, in the Premier League’s first season all but 11 players were British or Irish. With such few international commitments back then, you had your full squad available every year.

While preseason still serves the purpose of selling tickets, almost everything else about it has changed.

The season starts earlier and ends later. This year Manchester United played their final match - a friendly against an ASEAN all star team - on May 28th. They play their first preseason match on July 19th, 52 days later. Last year there were 55 days between the FA Cup final and the first preseason match. It’s a 34 percent decrease in the amount of time off compared to 30 years ago.

Following their post season tour of Malaysia many players met up with their national teams for a round of international games that took us into the second week of June.

This is a good year for clubs as typically there’s a World Cup or a Euros² every other year. Once the internationals are completed, participating players are required to be given at least three weeks off. This used to be four weeks but the last few years have seen in an influx of players returning “early” from their breaks. It used to be completely normal for star players to miss the first few games of the actual season after international tournaments.

So how much can you really get done in preseason if every other year you’re missing your most important players?

There are several tried and true arguments you’ll always hear as to why a proper preseason can make such a difference but all of them are very easy to debunk. Here are some of the most common:

Schedule: Preseason finally gives the coach ample time on the training ground that he doesn’t get during the course of the season

The most common argument and also the one that for some reason no one ever stops to think about.

You get about a week of uninterrupted work at the start of preseason before your friendlies begin - though again every other year half the squad misses this part. Once the games start that schedule becomes brutal.

Take a look at United’s preseason schedule this season.
July 19: vs Leeds (Stockholm, Sweden)
July 26: vs West Ham (New York, USA)
July 30: vs Bournemouth (Chicago, USA)
Aug 3: vs Everton (Atlanta, USA)
Aug 9: vs Fiorentina (Manchester, UK)

Five games in 21 days. A game every 4.2 days, which is only slightly less often than a team competing in Europe will during the season.

On a basic level, for the bulk of preseason you’re still in that match, recovery, day of training, get ready for the next match grind that you’re in for most of the season. But during the preseason there’s even more. United will play friendlies in Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom, requiring cross-Atlantic travel and time zone adjustments on the players bodies. This season the travel isn’t nearly as bad as previous years as they’re confined to a nice corner of the United States. Tours of the Far East also require brutal amounts of travel.

The time on the training pitch is not infinite. Brutally hot temperatures in the height of American summer limit how long sessions can be.

When training is over the day isn’t done, as preseason tours are notoriously filled with sponsorship commitments. Commercial obligations are certainly going to be prevalant for Manchester United this season, who are desperate to make up for the lost revenue of not playing in Europe this year.

Tours are grueling for players, often tiring them out both mentally and physically. When United got off to a slow start in the 2023-24 season, players suggested that one of the issues was actually too much preseason!

Weather: Players are more open to working on shape/out of possession responsibilities in nicer weather

There’s no disputing this. Out of possession work tends to be pretty boring with the players having to do a lot of standing around. Players naturally prefer to do those things in good weather vs the cold and rainy weather that the UK features for most of the year.

But that's not the entire year. August in the UK still features beautiful weather that typically isn’t as hot as it is in the United States. Furthermore when the season starts you don’t jump right into the two games a week grind. You’re only playing once a week for the first few weeks³ of the season giving you more time on the training ground than you had during the preseason tour and with nice weather to boot.

The month of August gives you plenty of time to work on your out of possession shape and your pressing structure but you can only prepare that so much. Once the season starts your pressing on a week to week basis is going to change based on your opponent. One week the pressing trigger might be the opponents left back, the next week the right back, and the next week one of the center backs. How crucial is it to be on the training ground for this? The list of managers to come in and successfully change a defensive system is not short.

You need to build up a players fitness so they could run, but pressing is about when to run and where to run. Most of that prep can be done in meetings.

Preseason is about squad bonding and building the vibes for the coming season

And that brings us to what may be the most valuable, or at least the most hyped, part of preseason: the vibes.

Getting the squad together and having them all hang out in a loose environment for a few weeks before the season. You can’t argue that you want your squad to have good vibes heading into the season.

Does that actually make an impact though?

In 2022-23 Manchester United went on tour to the far east. The vibes in that preseason were immaculate as the team thrashed Liverpool and put the disappointment of the previous campaign behind them. The players were enjoying themselves and fans started getting excited for United to play football again.

Then the team returned from the tour, got rolled in their first two games of the season, and the vibes went straight down the drain. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Managers talk up the importance of preseason only to often not take anything from it. Zidane Iqbal was the breakout star of the 2022-23 tour. He looked like someone who would play a little part in the upcoming season but didn’t play a single minute - not even in the League Cup. A year later Alvaro Carreras (then Alvaro Fernandez) had a breakout tour in a position of need for United. Ten Hag promptly told him he wasn’t in his plans.

On the 2023-24 tour Erik Ten Hag experimented with Jadon Sancho in a false-9 role. The move was widely considered to be a success. Sancho scored two goals including one against Arsenal. He was United’s best player on tour, but when the matches started Ten Hag opted to deploy Marcus Rashford as a striker flanked by Antony and Alejandro Garnacho - furthering the rift between the player and the coach.

Preseason is a time to try things. See what works and what doesn’t. Often good performances in preseason get swept aside due to a combination of the quality or intent of the opposition or the intensity of the match.

Most of the time managers are right to discard those performances, but when things don’t work they're all too quick to discard those issues too. Real tactical flaws will expose themselves but will be written off with lines about how the players just know the system yet. They need more time to learn it.

When the real games start, those tactical issues are still there, and teams quickly take advantage of them. When that happens managers tend to be very quick to throw away everything they worked on all summer and change things up.

Time on the training ground is great but it’s only valuable if the manager himself has good ideas.

It is true that managers need the time on the training ground preseason offers to put in more complex systems, but systems are only as good as your players. United could bring in the entire Sporting team who all know Ruben Amorim’s system backwards and forwards. That’s not going to improve the team because most of those Sporting players are not Premier League quality.

None of this is to say that preseason is a waste of time. It’s very valuable to get out there and play in front of fans across the globe. It’s very valuable to have the squad together and bonding for a few weeks. It’s very important to be doing fitness and tactical training ahead of the new season.

But preseason being some magical elixir that’s going to drastically improve players because they’ve had a few more practice sessions with their coach? I’m not buying it. If Ruben Amorim is going to improve United this season, it’s going to be because he starts utilizing the squad better.

If Manchester United are going to improve this season, they need to bring in some better players. If that happens before preseason great. If they don’t arrive until after preseason they’ll still provide the squad with the improvement they’re looking for⁴. If those reinforcements don’t arrive, it won’t matter how much time United spend on the training ground.

1. Compared to now. They were certainly in shape compared to the average person

2. Given how cosmopolitan the Premier League has become Copa America, Asian and Gold Cups come into play too. AFCON is typically in the winter months

3. Except the team playing in the Conference League, and the one League Cup match

4. You know, as long as they’re actually good.