The importance of pre-season

With many teams across the Football League beginning their pre-season yesterday, and Premier League teams beginning theirs this week, I thought I would take a few minutes to put down my thoughts on this annual ritual.

For many fans, pre-season is something to whet the appetite - it tells you "Hey, the football season's nearly here!" It gives the fans the opportunity for a sneak preview of how their team might perform in the upcoming season - showcasing new signings or, in some cases, new managers and their styles of play.

But a question often asked by many supporters is "How much do pre-season games matter?"

What they really mean by "games" is "results". How much attention can you pay to these games and what weight can you give to the overall performances and final scores? There are, generally, two schools of thought:

1 - It's All About Fitness
People with this perspective tend to brush aside any notion of winning pre-season games and to an extent don't pay much mind to the performances. They'll often say that the games are just extended training sessions and that they are designed to get the team's fitness levels up in time for the first game of the regular season. Therefore it doesn't matter whether you lose 2-0 to a side three divisions below you, or beat a decent European team 3-0. "It's all about fitness".

2 - It Helps Confidence
This approach to pre-season preaches that it is important for the team to get into a winning habit going into their first game. Fans with this attitude treat pre-season games almost as if they were league games - performances and results really do matter. Often they will use the games to pre-judge how new signings will fit in over the coming season.


But what is the truth of the importance of pre-season? There is no right and wrong, but my opinion is that it lies somewhere in-between the two.

The merits of point #1 above are plain to see. Running around cones on a training field is one thing, but really nothing can better prepare you for playing football than playing football. Might sound obvious but its true. On the other hand if it really was "just about fitness" then clubs would arrange in-house friendlies and save on travel expenses etc.

Thus, we must consider point #2. Often teams will arrange pre-season friendlies against vastly inferior opposition - often local sides. The benefits of this are two-fold. One, you get to help out a small local team by bringing a crowd to their ground. Two, you are likely to beat them by a decent margin and thus get your players into the "winning habit" described above.

Obviously many of the larger Premier League teams dispense with this in favour of overseas tours and marquee opponents, but that's largely because they have the resources to. And that leads me to another point. Games such as these are also good from a commercial aspect - they help get your club name exposure in foreign markets as well as giving fans in those areas the opportunity to attend a live game.

The drawback to placing too much weight on point #2 is that you can end up with false expectations. New signings can sometimes take time to settle in, and if you judge them too much on their 20-minute run out against a side from Thailand then you are in danger of forming a biased opinion. Additionally, the manager might experiment with new formations or strategies, and if he feels they don't work as he'd hoped then they could well be binned before the season starts; therefore the performances in pre-season may not be a good reflection of how the team will approach competitive games. If such experimentation costs you the result in a friendly game you've lost nothing but learned much.

Conclusions

In closing then, you can see that both points of view raise valid arguments. Neither can claim to be 100% accurate though. Yes, it is about getting teams fit and playing games but you'd also choose to win all of your games if you could. When I watch a pre-season game I don't have any expectations about the result but I'd be lying if I said losing them didn't disappoint me a little.

However, I do know that the most important thing is that when the whistle blows to kick off the league season, the club staff have done all they can in the preceding month or so to prepare the players efficiently.

'til next time
Adam