Fitness Without the Ball: What the World's Best Clubs Really Do

The Positions

Frade: Fitness is a Consequence of the Game

In Tactical Periodisation, there is no such thing as a conditioning day. The weekly structure – tension, duration, speed – assigns physical dominants to specific days, but these dominants arise entirely from the design of the game forms: small spaces and frequent changes of direction on Wednesday, large spaces and extended duration on Thursday, short actions and long recoveries on Friday.

Frade’s rationale is systemic rather than physiological. The player cannot be broken down into isolated components. If you train endurance in isolation, you train a body, not a footballer. The endurance required in a match is the stamina to make sound decisions under fatigue – and that can only develop within the game itself.

Seirul·lo: The Player as a Complex Structure

Seirul·lo arrives at the same conclusion from a different angle. The footballer consists of multiple interconnected dimensions – conditional, coordinative, cognitive, socio-affective, and emotional-volitional – that constantly influence one another. Training takes place in preferential simulation situations: game forms that load one dimension with particular emphasis without neglecting the others.

Unlike Frade, Seirul·lo permits individual supplementary work: strength, injury prevention, and tailored sessions for specific players. However, this is never conducted as team training without the ball.

Rangnick and Red Bull: Intensity Generated by the Game Form

Red Bull train everything with the ball, but for a different reason than Frade: their tactical philosophy demands relentless tempo and instant transitions. A small-sided game form incorporating strict counter-pressing rules is physically more demanding than any interval run. Physical conditioning is a natural by-product of the game form, and the game form is a direct reflection of the match.

Klopp: The Summer Baseline

During the season, Klopp operates similarly to most modern elite coaches: game forms, intensity as the primary goal, and individual supplementary work. The difference lies in pre-season. There, Klopp deliberately builds a significantly higher conditioning volume than during the rest of the campaign – using running, testing, and physical loading beyond what game forms alone produce. In his book, Pepijn Lijnders describes pre-season as the foundation without which the team's in-season intensity would simply be impossible.

Klopp has never argued that running makes anyone a better footballer. His stance is that a squad expected to press aggressively in October needs a solid physical baseline laid down in July. That is a fundamentally different argument.

Verheijen: Football Periodisation with Physiological Logic

Raymond Verheijen, the Dutch coach and author, sits between these schools of thought. He rejects isolated running just as Frade does, but on physiological grounds: football fitness is the ability to execute football-specific actions at the highest quality, repeatedly, over 90 minutes. This quality can only be developed within football-specific contexts.

What distinguishes Verheijen from Frade is that he explicitly links specific game forms to physiological adaptations: large-sided games for football endurance, small-sided games for explosiveness, and sprint drills with the ball for speed. He defines what is trained, when, and why – with a scientific precision that Frade deliberately avoids. Verheijen is also a fierce critic of overload, warning that excessive volume during pre-season inevitably causes injury crises by autumn.

What the Research Says

Sports science has investigated whether game forms can replace isolated running extensively since the 2000s. The empirical evidence is far more consistent than the heated public debate suggests.

Game forms elicit comparable cardiovascular loading. Small-sided games – 3v3 up to 5v5 on appropriately scaled pitches – reach heart rates and blood lactate concentrations comparable to high-intensity interval running. The aerobic adaptations are virtually identical. On this point, Frade, Seirul·lo, and Verheijen are proven right: base endurance does not require laps around the pitch.

Game forms replicate maximum sprinting speed poorly. This is the strongest scientific counterargument to a purely game-form-based doctrine. In small- and medium-sided games, players rarely reach their absolute maximum velocity, and the cumulative distance covered at high speed falls well short of match demands. A player who exclusively trains in small-sided games may only hit top speed on matchday – a notorious mechanism for acute hamstring strains.

The solution adopted by many professional clubs is simple: keep game forms as the core, supplemented by targeted sprint exposure – a handful of maximal sprints each week, with or without the ball, to condition the tissue to peak eccentric stress. This is not traditional running training; it is targeted injury prevention.

Strength training protects players. The evidence supporting isolated strength work for injury prevention is overwhelming – most notably eccentric hamstring conditioning, which drastically reduces soft-tissue injuries. The FIFA 11+ programme, which integrates strength, neuromuscular balance, and landing mechanics into the warm-up, has proven in controlled studies to reduce injury rates across amateur and youth football. This is training without the ball, and its efficacy is undisputed.

The ideal volume of pre-season remains contested. Here, the data is less definitive. A rapid spike in workload – reflected in the acute-to-chronic workload ratio – significantly increases injury risk. Klopp's pre-seasons were notoriously gruelling, but they spanned five to six weeks with carefully managed progressions. The danger is not a demanding summer; the danger is a gruelling summer following weeks of complete inactivity – which is precisely what occurs in most amateur setups.

What Practice Shows

When you analyse the fourteen elite clubs covered in this series side by side, a clear pattern emerges that does not neatly fit into any single ideological camp:

What they all have in common: Not a single world-class club forces its squad to run without the ball during the season. That matter is settled. The debate over whether game forms can replace traditional running laps is over at the top level.

What nearly all share: Almost every top club supplements individually without the ball – covering gym strength, injury prevention, sprint exposure, and rehabilitation. Frade remains the lone philosophical exception here, and even clubs following his blueprint introduce supplementary work in practice.

Where they diverge: pre-season. Frade insists the weekly structure should remain constant year-round. Klopp believes summer demands a distinct conditioning phase. Both philosophies have produced elite champions.

The explanation lies in context. Frade's model assumes elite professionals who maintain peak physical condition across all twelve months of the year, transitioning smoothly from one campaign to the next. Klopp's model prepares a squad to execute an extreme pressing style that exceeds what game forms alone can develop in training. Crucially, it relies on five to six full weeks of controlled build-up. Both approaches are correct within their specific contexts. Neither is suitable for a grassroots amateur club.

The Decision for Youth and Grassroots Coaches

This section represents our interpretation.

The theoretical debates of elite football are largely irrelevant if you only have two training sessions a week. What matters boils down to five practical rules.

Children Do Not Need Conditioning

Up until roughly U13, fitness drills without the ball have no place in development. Children recover rapidly, their aerobic capacity develops naturally alongside biological growth, and every minute spent running without the ball is lost technical development at the golden age of motor learning. If your U9 or U11 side is running laps, they are doing so solely because the coach lacks modern coaching knowledge.

With Two Sessions a Week, Nobody Runs Laps

If you only have 180 minutes of pitch time per week, you cannot afford to waste a single minute on isolated running. Aerobic demands are fully met through game forms – compact pitches, small team sizes, and minimal downtime. If your side runs out of steam after 60 minutes, the solution is not a cross-country run. The solution is designing game forms that keep players moving at match tempo for 20 continuous minutes.

Sprints Must Be Included

This is the one critical exception, and it is a matter of injury prevention rather than conditioning. If your players only train in tight spaces and then unleash a 40-metre sprint for the first time that week on matchday, you are inviting hamstring strains. Incorporate a game form covering large distances once a week – full-pitch transitions, counter-attacking drills, or vertical runs in behind. If space does not allow for that, add four to six maximal-effort sprints at the end of a session, with complete recovery between reps. It takes five minutes.

Strength and Prevention Belong in the Warm-Up

The FIFA 11+ programme, or a tailored routine combining bodyweight strength, balance, and landing mechanics as your standard warm-up, takes ten minutes and reliably reduces injury rates. This is training without the ball, and it is the only form unconditionally recommended in amateur football.

Pre-Season is Not a Boot Camp

Klopp's pre-season model cannot be transplanted to amateur football because the baseline is absent: four weeks of pre-season with two sessions a week equals eight sessions in total. If you spend four of them running in the woods, you throw away half your preparation time for the technical and tactical elements that actually decide games. Amateur pre-season should simply be a normal training block featuring slightly higher volume in game forms and slightly less tactical complexity. Frade's philosophy fits grassroots football far better than Klopp's – not because Frade is universally right, but because the amateur schedule demands efficiency.

The final consideration is workload progression. A side returning from a six-week summer break should never start week one with the most demanding, high-intensity game form of the year. Workload must be increased progressively over three to four weeks. That is not physical conditioning; it is common sense.

Key Takeaways

• Not a single world-class club forces its squad to run without the ball during the season. The debate is settled in professional football.
• Almost all elite clubs supplement individually without the ball: strength, injury prevention, and top-speed sprint exposure. Frade is the lone exception, and even his adherents adapt this in practice.
• Frade and Klopp disagree on pre-season. Both are right within their respective environments – year-round athletic readiness for Frade versus five weeks of structured loading for Klopp.
• Scientific research supports game forms for aerobic endurance, cautions against neglecting sprint exposure, and confirms the protective value of strength training.
• For youth and grassroots coaches: children do not run laps. With two sessions a week, nobody runs without the ball. Sprints must be included. Prevention belongs in the warm-up. Pre-season is not a boot camp.
• Verheijen bridges the gap: game forms remain the core, but with explicit physiological targets and a rigorous warning against player overload.

When you periodise your season in Coach OS, you immediately see whether high-speed distances are covered and whether workload ramps up too aggressively after a break. The decisions you make remain yours – the platform simply provides full visibility over your plan.

Sources and Further Reading

• The articles in this series covering Porto, Barcelona, Manchester City, Red Bull, Liverpool, Benfica, and the Dutch clubs, each with primary sources on training methodology.
• Raymond Verheijen: Football Periodisation – on the physiological rationale behind game-based conditioning.
• Javier Mallo: Complex Football – comparing the coaching frameworks of Seirul·lo and Frade.
• Pepijn Lijnders: Intensity – insights into Klopp’s pre-season design and weekly structure.
• FIFA Medical: Documentation and clinical trials regarding the FIFA 11+ injury prevention programme.
• Sports science systematic reviews on small-sided games and load management in football, including publications from Jens Bangsbo’s research group in Copenhagen.

Note on evidence: The scientific findings outlined here are well supported by peer-reviewed literature and are synthesised without individual citations. The club classifications in the table summarise the detailed analyses from the individual case studies and represent coaching consensus in nuanced cases ("partially").