Conditioning without the ball: what the best clubs in the world really do

The positions

Frade: conditioning is a consequence of the game

In tactical periodisation there is no conditioning day. The weekly structure — tension, duration, speed — assigns physical dominants to the days, but those dominants arise from the design of the games: small spaces and many changes of direction on Wednesday, large spaces and long duration on Thursday, short actions and long rests on Friday.

Frade's reasoning is not physiological but systemic. The player cannot be taken apart. Whoever trains endurance in isolation trains a body, not a footballer. The endurance needed in a match is the endurance for decisions under fatigue — and that arises only in the game.

Seirul·lo: the player as a complex structure

Seirul·lo arrives at the same result by another route. The player has several dimensions — conditional, coordinative, cognitive, socio-affective, emotional-volitional — that influence each other. Training takes place in preferred simulation situations, games that load one dimension more strongly without switching the others off.

Unlike Frade, Seirul·lo allows individual supplementation: strength, prevention, specific work for individual players. But not as team training without the ball.

Rangnick and Red Bull: intensity out of the game form

Red Bull trains everything with the ball, but with a different justification from Frade's: the playing idea demands pace and readiness to transition, and a small-sided game with a counter-pressing rule is physically harder than any interval run. Conditioning is a by-product of the game form, and the game form is an image of the match.

Klopp: the base in summer

During the season Klopp works much as everyone else does: games, intensity as the aim, individual supplementation. The difference lies in pre-season. There Klopp deliberately builds more conditioning volume than in the rest of the year — with runs, with tests, with loads beyond what games produce. Pepijn Lijnders describes pre-season in his book as the foundation without which the intensity of the season would not be possible.

Klopp has never claimed that running makes better footballers. He has claimed that a team still expected to press in October needs a base in July. That is a different argument.

Verheijen: football periodisation with physiological logic

Raymond Verheijen, a Dutch coach and author, stands between the positions. He rejects isolated running as Frade does, but for physiological reasons: football fitness is the ability to repeat football-specific actions at high quality, often. That ability can only be trained in football-specific situations.

What separates him from Frade: Verheijen assigns games clearly to physiological aims. Large games for football-specific endurance, small games for explosiveness, sprint forms with the ball for speed. He says what is trained when and why — with a precision Frade deliberately avoids. And he is a sharp critic of overload: too much volume in pre-season, says Verheijen, produces injuries in the autumn.

What the research says

Sports science has investigated intensively since the 2000s whether games can replace isolated training. The findings are more consistent than the debate suggests.

Games produce comparable cardiovascular load. Small-sided games — 3v3 to 5v5 on adjusted pitch sizes — reach heart rates and lactate values comparable to interval runs. The aerobic adaptation is similar. On this point Frade, Seirul·lo and Verheijen are right: base endurance does not have to be run.

Games represent top speed less well. That is the most important finding against the pure game-form doctrine. In small and medium games players rarely reach their maximum sprint speed, and the distance they cover at high speed is below that of a match. A player who only trains in games may sprint at full speed in the match for the first time that week — and that is a known injury mechanism for the hamstrings.

The consequence many professional clubs have drawn: games as the core, supplemented by targeted sprint exposure — a few sprints at high speed per week, with or without the ball, to accustom the body to the load. That is not running training in the classical sense. It is injury prevention.

Strength training protects. The evidence for isolated strength training in injury prevention is strong — best known for eccentric hamstring work, which clearly reduces injuries there. The FIFA 11+ programme, which combines strength, balance and jumping technique as a warm-up, has lowered injury rates in amateur and youth football in controlled studies. That is training without the ball, and it works.

The volume of pre-season is disputed. Here the research is less clear-cut. There is evidence that too rapid an increase in load — the ratio of the current week to the average of the preceding weeks — encourages injuries. Klopp's pre-seasons were hard, but they lasted five or six weeks and rose in a controlled way. The problem is not the hard summer. The problem is the hard summer after a winter without load — and that is the situation of most amateur teams.

What practice shows

Laying the fourteen clubs of this series side by side gives a picture that matches none of the schools entirely:

What they all have in common: no club at the top of the world lets its team run without the ball during the season. That is settled. The debate about whether games replace running is over in professional football.

What almost all have in common: nearly every club supplements individually without the ball — strength, prevention, sprint exposure, rehabilitation. Frade is the exception here, and even clubs working by his method do it in practice.

Where they differ: pre-season. Frade says the week stays the same. Klopp says the summer is different. Both have won.

The resolution lies in the context. Frade's model assumes professionals under load twelve months a year who glide from one season into the next. Klopp's model assumes a team that in autumn has to produce an intensity above what games alone generate. And it assumes five to six weeks in which the build-up can be controlled. Both are right for their context. Neither is right for an amateur club.

The decision for youth and amateur coaches

This section is our interpretation.

The professionals' debate is largely irrelevant for two sessions a week. What counts are five questions.

Children need no conditioning

Up to around U13 there is no meaningful conditioning work without the ball. Children recover quickly, their endurance develops with growth, and every minute without the ball is a lost minute at the age when technique is learned most efficiently. If your under-9s or under-11s are running, they are running because the coach knows no different.

With two sessions nobody runs

Whoever has 180 minutes a week has not a minute for running. The aerobic load comes from games — small pitches, few players, short breaks. If your team fades after 60 minutes, the answer is not a cross-country run. The answer is a game that stays at match tempo for 20 minutes because you designed it that way.

Sprints have to occur

That is the one exception, and it is not conditioning but prevention. If your players only train on small pitches and make their first 40-metre sprint of the week at the weekend, you are risking hamstring injuries. Build in one game a week with large distances — transition play across the whole pitch, counter-attacking forms, runs in behind. Or, if that is not possible, four to six full-speed sprints at the end of a session, with complete rest in between. That takes five minutes.

Strength and prevention belong in the warm-up

The FIFA 11+ programme, or your own variant of strengthening, balance and jumping exercises as a fixed warm-up, costs ten minutes and demonstrably lowers the injury rate. That is training without the ball, and it is the only kind that can be recommended without reservation in amateur football.

Pre-season is not a fitness camp

The Klopp lesson does not apply to amateurs, because the context is missing: four weeks with two sessions are eight sessions. Filling four of them with runs leaves four sessions fewer for what decides the season. Pre-season in amateur football is a normal training phase with a little more volume in the games and a little less tactical complexity. Frade's approach fits better here than Klopp's — not because Frade is right, but because the amateur calendar proves him right.

What remains is the question of load progression. A team that has had six weeks off should not begin the first week with the hardest game of the season. The load rises over three or four weeks. That is not fitness building. That is common sense.

What to take away

• No club at the top of world football lets its team run without the ball during the season. The debate is settled in professional football.
• Almost all clubs supplement individually without the ball: strength, prevention, sprint exposure. Frade is the exception, and even his followers do it.
• Frade and Klopp contradict each other in pre-season. Both are right for their context — twelve months of load with Frade, five weeks of controlled build-up with Klopp.
• The research supports games for endurance, warns against missing sprint exposure and confirms the value of strength training for prevention.
• For youth and amateur coaches: children do not run. With two sessions nobody runs. Sprints have to occur. Prevention belongs in the warm-up. Pre-season is not a fitness camp.
• Verheijen is the bridge: games as the core, but with a clear physiological assignment and a warning against overload.

Anyone who periodises their week across the season in Coach OS can see whether the long distances occur and whether the load rises too fast after a break. What you make of that is your decision — the tools only show what you planned.

Sources and further reading

• The articles of this series on Porto, Barcelona, Manchester City, Red Bull, Liverpool, Benfica and the Dutch clubs, each with sources on training methodology.
• Raymond Verheijen: Football Periodisation — on the physiological case for game-based training.
• Javier Mallo: Complex Football — comparing Seirul·lo and Frade.
• Pepijn Lijnders: Intensity — on Klopp's pre-season and weekly structure.
• FIFA Medical: documentation of the 11+ programme and the associated studies.
• Sports-science review papers on small-sided games and load management in football, among others from the group around Jens Bangsbo in Copenhagen.

A note on the evidence: the research findings are well documented in review papers but are summarised here without individual citations. The assignment of clubs in the table is a condensation from the individual articles, and in the borderline cases ("partly") a judgement call.