Pre-season isn’t about doing more. It’s about starting right. Before the tactics, before the drills, there’s a chance to set the tone, build trust, and create clarity, before the pressure of results arrives and everything gets loud.
That’s the line I wrote on a cheatsheet I built specifically for this, and it’s still the whole philosophy. Here’s what actually goes into eight weeks of pre-season when I run it.
Set The Tone Before You Set The Fitness
Early in pre-season, the temptation is to front-load every principle you have. Shape, press, triggers, patterns. But players are human, they have limited bandwidth, and three clear messages beat ten mixed ones every time.
My own non-negotiables for a team are usually simple: control your controllables. Be responsible and accountable for what’s actually within your remit. Work as hard as you possibly can. Be positive, especially in the tough moments. A team that does those three things together has a chance of winning something. A team that doesn’t has no chance at all, whatever the tactics say.
The Actual 8-Week Focus
For my own team, the real focus areas across eight weeks of pre-season look like this: get fitter and improve intensity through a conditioning programme and more competition in training. Play the first or second pass forward instead of sideways and safe, more vertical, breaking lines quicker. Improve attacking triangles and the relationships between players inside them. Close space together when pressing, as a unit, not by charging the ball individually. Play passes diagonally, switching the angle of attack rather than always going straight. Adjust the defensive line and get sharper with zonal marking.
That’s not a wish list, it’s what I actually post to my own team week by week, and I’d rather coaches see the real focus areas than a generic template.
Running, Done Properly
Pre-season running is hated by most players, and honestly, I hate players coming to training and never touching a ball. So any running programme I build is designed to be done in the shortest time possible, aiming to lift aerobic capacity by around 5% over six weeks so the team can perform more bouts of intense work during matches.
A few things matter if you’re building your own version. Warm-ups are not optional, don’t skip them. Players need to be fresh when they do the running, not fatigued from earlier work in the session. Injuries happen in pre-season, so individualise where you can and monitor closely. And if you’re adapting someone else’s programme, adjust the time rather than the distance, it’s a safer lever to pull.
First Week Back
If this was my first week back for pre-season, I’d be doing a lot of circuit and box work. These exercise types let you set the intensity you want while still getting players fitness reps with the ball in their feet. There’s a place for running without the ball, but it needs to be balanced, not the whole session.
One of my favourite pre-season circuits blends dribbling, passing combinations, and constant movement in a queue-free rotation, so players are never standing around waiting for a turn, and the running happens as a side effect of the football rather than as its own separate block.
What Three Real Pre-Season Games Taught Me
After a recent run of three pre-season games with my own team, I wrote up ten honest insights, and a few of them are worth repeating because they apply beyond that specific squad.
The games were about building match fitness, but you can’t coach the competitiveness out of players once the whistle goes, the speed of play was quick and frantic, with a few late challenges thrown in regardless of the “friendly” label. We’d been working hard on playing the first or second pass to a free player facing forward, but we still turned into trouble more times than I’d like, which told me the players needed more specific help with that decision, not just more repetition of the pattern. Duels mattered more than expected, aggression and pressing a player’s first touch is something you have to keep coaching, it doesn’t just appear. Transitions were slow in both directions, both teams hesitated after losing the ball, which gave the team that won it several free touches before any pressure arrived. And we failed at several of the things we’d been working on all pre-season, which stung less once I reframed it as the most valuable learning tool available before it actually mattered, my job there is to help, not to criticise.
That last point is the one I’d want every coach to take from this. Pre-season matches should tell you what your training hasn’t prepared players for yet. A defeat that exposes a real gap is more useful to you than a win that hides one.
Setting Expectations Before A Ball Is Kicked
Pre-season is also when I tell parents and players how selection is actually going to work for the season, not after the first complaint arrives. Everyone starts at least once a month. Everyone gets meaningful minutes, not five-minute cameos. The team on the pitch each week won’t always be the one most likely to win, it’ll be the one that develops everyone. Saying that out loud before the season starts means that when a parent asks why their child isn’t starting, you’re pointing back to a plan they already knew about, not defending a decision made on the spot.
Making It Fit Your Team
None of this is about running your players into the ground for eight weeks and hoping fitness shows up in October. It’s about deciding, early, what you actually want this team to be, saying it clearly and only a few times, and building every session, running included, around the ball. If your first-session priorities need a starting point beyond fitness, here’s how I structure the very first session with a new group.
What’s the one thing you’re setting as a non-negotiable for your team this pre-season, and have you actually said it out loud to them yet?
Ready to plan your pre-season properly?
The Football Coaching Academy includes a full pre-season fitness circuit library and a pitch-based running plan built around the ball, not against it. Current membership terms are shown on Skool.