Are Pre-Season Tours Setting Teams Up For Success Or Failure?

An Effective Pre-Season is Vital

A well-planned pre-season, if executed properly, will lay the foundation for a successful season. It provides a window of opportunity for coaches to integrate new signings into the team quickly, or, in the case of the five Premier League clubs with new Head Coaches, embed entirely new systems, formations and playing philosophies throughout the squad. Fitness and S&C coaches can deliver lung bursting drills on the pitch and muscle burning exercises in the strength room without the worry of exhausting players before a must win game at the weekend. Sports Scientists will collect a dizzying array of data in an effort to drive season-long performance to new levels, whilst Physios work tirelessly to keep players healthy and Massage Therapists are in constant demand to boost recovery. Maximizing contact time between players and staff during this period is essential if the pre-season is going to be successful, and a successful pre-season can determine whether teams make a flying start and maintain momentum throughout the season, or instead spend the year playing catch-up.

Pre-Season Tours: Do They Maximize or Jeopardize Team Preparation?

The ever-increasing commercial demands placed on Premier League clubs means that pre-season now seems to have become less focused on team preparation, and instead much more concerned with raising brand awareness, fulfilling sponsorship requirements and generating revenue. Clubs are jetting off on pre-season tours all over the world, giving supporters who may live thousands of miles away a chance to see their favorite players and potentially recruiting a new loyal fanbase. These tours enable clubs to strengthen existing relationships with global partners, or even open up new sponsorship and revenue creating opportunities previously unavailable to them. Because of this, the 2024 pre-season period will see Premier League clubs collectively travel approximately 170,125 miles, but what impact does this level of travel have on training time and contact between players and coaches, and therefore on the likelihood of delivering an effective pre-season? The real question is: can pre-season tours actually jeopardize a team’s chances of success?

2024 Pre-Season Travel Demands

Here we have a league table breaking down the miles each club will travel between games during pre-season:

 
The furthest travelling club this year are Manchester United, who will accumulate a total distance of 16,213 miles before their Community Shield opener against Manchester City on August 10th. Interestingly, the Premier League Champions themselves are ranked 11th on the travel list with 9,795 miles, whilst last season’s runners-up Arsenal are also ranked 2nd on the travel list, the Gunners scheduled to clock up 15,014 miles. Last year’s third placed team Liverpool are ranked 13th on the travel list at 8,246 miles, with all four of these clubs participating in extensive tours of the USA throughout June. Clearly, this amount of time spent on long distance travel is time that players aren’t on the pitch, eroding valuable training sessions and player-coach contact. But what are the other factors clubs need to consider?

Travel Creates Training Disruption

Firstly, pre-season tours require extended air travel on multiple occasions, and aircraft are terrible environments for players to be in. This is mainly because the microclimate of the cabin consists of cool, dry, recirculated air which has significantly lower pressure and oxygen saturation than at ground level. Air travel also requires players to remain seated and immobile for extended periods of time, and even though Premier League players are unlikely to be travelling in the cheap seats, this will cause muscle and connective tissues to shorten and stiffen. The pre-season schedule demands that teams fly to multiple different cities in a short timeframe, and even short-haul flights have been shown to increase injury risk and impede performance. This means that at a time when teams are trying to build performance levels, players are going into training and games with a lower level of trainability.

Factor in the jet lag, and we have the most obvious problem created by pre-season tours, which is disruption to the players circadian rhythm and their sleep patterns. Moving across time-zones causes the circadian rhythm to shift out of harmony with the local environment, and this can significantly compromise performance. It takes approximately 24 hours per time-zone crossed for a player to adapt to the new local time, and the greater the number of time zones travelled, the longer this adaptation process takes. Teams travelling to the west coast of the USA, including Manchester United, Arsenal and Bournemouth, will experience an eight-hour time shift, and this is likely to cause significant circadian de-synchronization and increased fatigue whilst they are out there. Just as importantly, how long will it take them to re-adapt when they return?

Are Pre-Season Tours a False Economy?

Pre-season tours undoubtedly generate significant revenue, along with numerous marketing and sponsorship opportunities for the teams involved. The top Premier League clubs are reported in some sections of the media to earn between £10-15million for ten days work, money which would provide more resources to improve those teams.

However, the payoff may be that coaches and staff have to sacrifice contact time with their players who, because of the amount of travel involved, are returning from these tours tired and under-prepared. The consequences of this are that individual performances and team results could be negatively affected, particularly in the early stages of the season. When a team gets off to a bad start it can be difficult to regain lost ground, and the pressure soon begins to build. With each place in the Premier League table now a reported £2.2million, are teams looking in the wrong place for revenue? Should they in fact be optimizing the preparation opportunities that pre-season provides, and ensuring that they enter into the new season in the best possible shape to compete? We may well find the answers in August.

WHAT APOLLO CAN DO FOR YOU

ApolloV2 is not a traditional ‘one size fits all’ athlete management system. Instead, we are a highly adaptable platform which can create customized dashboards specifically tailored to each team’s individual needs and unique way of working.

Our system equips teams with the ability to generate custom-made data visualizations without software code. We have more API’s than any other system, which allows us to collect data from the multiple tools and systems staff are using, and then combine it efficiently to allow coaches to make informed decisions with their players.

We have Power Bi and Tableau integrated into our ecosystem, which enables us to build bespoke, best-in-class data reports designed to meet specific requirements and ensure that coaches receive the data driven insights they need, to inform decision making and influence positive change.

To learn more about using ApolloV2 for performance enhancement, email – alamb@apollov2.com.