Huddersfield Town are one of only four Championship teams to have not yet returned for preseason training

It’s got to that really boring part of the time in between seasons, where last season seems like a distant memory but the new season seems far away too. One of the signs that it’s not too long until the new season returns is when the players come back for preseason training. I’ve noticed on social media that many other clubs seem to be back in training but so far Huddersfield Town’s squad are still on their holidays.

I then thought that someone should find out which Championship teams have returned and which ones haven’t. And, because once an idea like that occurs to me, I find it hard to let go, I decided that person should be me. So I’ve gone through all of the 24 Championship teams’ social media feeds and found out which ones are back in training and when they returned. Here’s what I found… 

(Before anyone starts in the comments, I fully appreciate how nerdy and weird this article is but seeing as though I made the spreadsheet I decided I might as well write the article and share it with the rest of the world!)

Which teams have not yet returned to training?

Huddersfield Town are one of four Championship teams yet to announce their return to training on their official social media feeds. The other three are Coventry, Leeds and Leicester. However, all three of those teams finished last season much later than Town, so have more reason for an extended summer break. While Town’s season ended against Reading on 8 May, Leeds and Leiceter were fighting for survival in the Premier League until 28 May and Coventry had a playoff campaign that extended their season until 27 May. 

(Somewhat) Interestingly, Southampton, despite also being relegated from the Premier League and finishing on the same day as Leeds and Leicester, returned to training on the 28th of June. Though their relegation was confirmed far earlier than the other two so they maybe didn’t have quite as gruelling an end to the season. They might also want an extended preseason to bed in Russell Martin’s ideas (which a cynic would quickly summarise as: keep passing the ball sideways until the whole stadium falls asleep).

Another thing to note is that the beaten playoff semi-finalists from last season are back in training. Middlesbrough were back in on the 26th and Sunderland the 28th of June, which means they’ve not granted their players any additional time off for the extra few weeks they had to continue last season. 

When did the Championship teams return to preseason training

Here’s a quick summary of the twenty Championship teams that are already back in training. My not-very-scientific method was to scroll through each team’s social media feed until I found a “We’re back!” tweet with a smiley face emoji. So these dates could be out by a day if some clubs do testing away from the glare of their in-house social media team. Though, judging by the research I did for this article, there isn’t a single thing that takes place inside a football club that their social media team won’t shove a camera in front of and tweet out with a liberal sprinkling of emojis. 

Anyway, here they are in date order:

19 June 

Watford

20 June

Blackburn Rovers

Cardiff City

West Bromwich Albion

23 June

Birmingham City

26 June 

Bristol City

Hull City

Ipswich Town

Middlesbrough

Norwich City

Preston North End

Queens Park Rangers

Stoke City

Swansea City

28 June

Millwall

Plymouth Argyle

Rotherham United

Southampton

Sunderland

30 June 

Sheffield Wednesday

So, assuming Town return to training next week, Watford, Blackburn, Cardiff and West Brom have around two weeks of a head start on us in terms of fitness. The rest of the teams have about a week or so, some a bit less. 

The most common date to return was last Monday, the 26th of June, with nine teams returning on the same day. It’s also possible that some of five teams that officially confirmed their returns two days later could have started their testing on the Monday but waited until Wednesday to share on social media.

Should Huddersfield Town fans be worried that we’re starting preseason later than most of the division?

It would be easy, after messing around collecting all this data about other teams’ preseason training, to get in a flap about Town leaving it too late and how we’ve not left ourselves enough time to get fit. But, in all honesty, I think we’re going to be fine. You could probably make a decent argument that the players will benefit more from the additional rest than having two more weeks of being beasted around the training ground. 

Last season we made a real mess of our preseason, but that’s because we cut it down to just a few weeks. Assuming the players return at some point next week, which I’m fairly sure they will, Town will still have a month and a bit to get into shape. It’s also worth remembering that literally no other manager in our league will have done as many preseasons as our manager, so Neil Warnock knows what it takes to get a team ready for a season. Unlike Danny Schofield, who, through no fault of his own, was told he was in charge of preparing the team for the season at almost no notice and it was already too late to get the players fit enough to play the way he wanted them to play.

I also think footballers have changed quite a bit over the last twenty years or so. I remember a time when footballers used to really go to seed in the post-season break and come back near physical wrecks – with rumours of players putting on a stone or more in the few weeks they’d been given off. I don’t go on Instagram much, but when I do, I often see players in their summer breaks doing additional sessions with private trainers (say what you like about him, but Sorba Thomas seems to have been puting in a lot of extra work this summer). So quite a lot of them are actually training on the side. This seems like an odd kind of moonlighting to me, but I suppose it’s ultimately for their benefit. 

Does starting preseason early give you an advantage?

Watford were the first team to return, on the 19th of June – just nine days after the Champions League final which brought an end to last season. While it would be easy to get into an arms race with teams to see who can be the earliest back into preseason training, I’m not sure you’re really doing yourself much good by reducing the amount of rest your players have between seasons.

It doesn’t really need to be said, but I’m not a sports scientist so I don’t know the technical answer about the best way to prepare an athelete for a physically demanding Championship season. However, it feels intuitively wrong to make players that are basically already in good shape to hammer themselves for seven weeks like Watford are doing. Valerian Ismael has come in as their latest manager and most likely wants to teach them his methods over an extended period, but they’ll most likely have sacked him before Halloween anyway so I wonder what’s the point? For efficiency, maybe Watford should allow their next three managers to each have a week of preseason training too, so they can do some tactical work in advance of their short stints in charge later on this season.

At this time of years it’s quite common for managers to say, “We want to be the fittest team in the league.” and that kind of mentality can become a race to the bottom. Because you can only achieve that by being willing to push your players harder than the other managers in the league. When we did this with Carlos Corberan’s Murderball training style that he borrowed from Marco Bielsa, when he first came to Huddersfield, it just led to a string of muscle injuries.

The only time I can think that we’ve really nailed a preseason and it’s made a big difference was David Wagner’s summer of 2016 when we brought in a load of cheap or free players from Germany and then moulded them and the rest of our squad into a team that were that season’s surprise package. The famous team-building trip to the wilderness in Sweden, triple training sessions and Michael Hefele wondering around Austria in his dressing gown all contributed to that being a memorable preseason that set us up for probably the season I’ve most enjoyed following Town.

What will Huddersfield Town’s preseason look like?

If everything goes to plan, I think our preseason will have a fairly classic preseason feel to it. It’ll start at Canalside (Millers Oils Whatchamalcallit) with all the usual testing and pictures of players sweating. I know some more modern coaches want players working with the ball quite quickly and don’t do a lot of fitness work but I suspect Ronnie Jepson will be doing his drill sergeant routine: screaming at players while they compete laps around the pitch until they vomit, mostly likely while he eats a bacon sandwich. 

Then there’ll be the trip to Cornwall and three friendlies against fairly poor local teams which should be a chance to build fitness, work on tactics a bit and have a barbecue back at Neil Warnock’s back garden. This trip is part of Warnock folklore and he’s done it with nearly every team he’s coached in preseason. 

After that we’ve got a friendly against Stockport County, last season’s League Two losing playoff finalists. They’ll be slightly stiffer opposition than the three teams on the Cornwall trip but the club has already announced their plan to play two halves of 60 minutes, so it’ll be an odd and slightly gruelling spectacle for fans to watch. I can think of exactly zero preseason friendlies that I’ve come away from wishing they had been half an hour longer, but I suppose it will be good for fitness levels.

Then the showpiece event of the preseason will be the home friendly against SC Heerenveen, who are a decent Dutch team who should provide us with a proper test ahead of the new season, a week before our opening game against Plymouth. We often don’t manage to schedule a preseason game at home, so it’s nice to see us putting on a game and it being against a team that we should be able to compete well with. They finished 8th in the Eredivisie last season, so Heerenveen aren’t exactly giants of European football but they’re not rubbish either. Based on the things Carel Eiting said when he moved from the Dutch league to the Championship, they’ll most likely be a bit more technically gifted than our team but maybe not as physical and will struggle if we play at a high tempo.