The preseason tour is booked before anyone plans training

Commercial itineraries are signed months ahead of the fitness calendar, so the loading plan is built around flights and appearances.

Ask a fitness coach when their preseason plan is finalised and then ask the commercial director when the tour contract was signed. The gap is usually about eight months, and the contract wins. That ordering is the single most underrated constraint in professional sport, and it explains a great deal that gets blamed on modern training methods.

A tour deal is not a loose arrangement to play some friendlies. It specifies cities, dates, minimum minutes for named players, media appearances, sponsor events and, increasingly, a guarantee that a certain number of first-choice starters will feature. Those clauses carry financial penalties. So when a coach says he would like a quiet block of work in one location, he is asking the club to breach a commercial agreement, and the answer is no.

The cost is not mainly the matches. It is the fragmentation. Three time zones in eighteen days turns what should be a continuous build into a series of interrupted blocks with recovery days spent on aircraft. You can still get players fit. You cannot get them fit in the orderly way the textbook describes, and the compromise usually comes out of the middle of the build, where the boring accumulation work lives.

I think clubs have been dishonest about the trade. Tour revenue is real and often substantial, particularly for clubs whose domestic market is saturated. Fine. Say that. What actually gets said is that the tour is about growing the fanbase and gives the squad valuable competitive minutes, which nobody in the building believes.

There is a version of this that works. Sign shorter tours, negotiate appearance clauses in aggregate rather than per match, and price the schedule so the club can buy back a rest day when it needs one. A few clubs now do exactly that, and their fitness staff will tell you it changed everything.

The rest keep signing the long itinerary and then wondering, in September, why the squad looks flat. It looked flat in a boardroom the previous November, in a slide with three cities on it.