The off-season is the most misunderstood period in a footballer’s calendar. It’s often treated as either total rest or a free-for-all of unstructured running. In reality, it’s the one window in the year where we can apply load with genuine precision - no fixtures dictating the week, no travel, no compromise. But precision requires measurement, and that’s why we partnered with PlayerData for our off-season camps.
The problem: every player arrives at a different starting point.
When players come into camp, their entry points can differ. One might be three weeks post-season with a solid accumulation block behind him. Another might be returning from an injury and barely featured. A third could be off the back of an extensive holiday and done next to nothing.
Prescribing the same session to all of them isn’t coaching - it’s guesswork. Our job is to apply a specific amount of load to each player regardless of their entry point, and to make sure that load fits within the periodised structure of the week. Without objective data, that’s almost impossible to do well.
How we structure the week.
Our camps alternate between intensive and extensive days.
Intensive days are built around high-intensity actions: accelerations, decelerations, changes of direction. The volume is lower, but the mechanical demand on the tissue - particularly the likes of quads and adductors is high.
Extensive days flip the equation: higher total volume, larger pitch spaces, more continuous running, but with the mechanical stress deliberately capped.
The alternation only works if each day stays true to its intention.
Where PlayerData changes the game: live data.
This is the piece that made the partnership essential. The PlayerData units give us live, in-session visibility of each player’s load - not just total distance, but the mechanical picture underneath it: high-speed running, sprint distance, accelerations, and decelerations.
Total load tells you how much a player has done. Mechanical load tells you what that work is costing his tissue. Two players can finish a session with identical total distances and completely different mechanical profiles - one having covered his ground in steady tempo running, the other in repeated maximal sprints. On paper they look the same. In the body, they are nothing alike.
With live data on the touchline, we can intervene in real time. If a player is short of the targeted load for the day, we top them up before the session ends rather than discovering the shortfall in a report the next morning. If an extensive day is drifting mechanical e.g. too many high-intensity efforts creeping in - we adjust the constraints on the spot.
Individualised load inside a shared structure.
The practical result is that every player trains inside the same periodised week but receives his own dose. The returning loanee isn’t dragged into volumes his tissue isn’t prepared for. The well-conditioned senior pro isn’t under-stimulated because the session was pitched at the group’s lowest common denominator. Each player’s numbers are managed against his own targets, day by day, and those targets sit inside a weekly structure with a clear physiological logic.
That’s what accurate periodisation actually means: not a neat plan on paper, but the right load, in the right player, on the right day - verified in real time rather than assumed.
The off-season is too short and too valuable to run on guesswork.
PlayerData lets us run it on evidence.
