Why are Premier League footballers hiring private fitness coaches – and is it a problem?

It’s July 2023 and Instagram is preoccupied with images of a topless Jordan Henderson hitting a punchbag. Muscles bulging and soaked in sweat, his face is etched in a grimace of extreme exertion. The caption reads: “Summer holiday camp.”

At the time, it was assumed that the then-club captain was sending a message to Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp that he was fit and ready to fight for his place; World Cup winner Alexis Mac Allister and Hungary midfielder Dominik Szoboszlai were added to the club’s midfield ranks that summer.

Of course, it didn’t quite play out like that. Henderson ended up signing for Saudi Pro League side Al Ettifaq later that month, at which point his summer fitness work became a message about still being in peak condition as he headed to a lower level of competition.

Although Henderson’s extracurricular training perhaps drew more attention than that of his peers, the former Liverpool man is far from alone in using the off-season to make physical improvements. During summer, it’s hard to avoid social media posts of players sweating it out in Dubai, Spain or Portugal with private trainers, communicating to fans and industry that they’re prepping hard for the new season.

It seems a win-win for clubs and players: all parties want the players to be fit and ready to go when they get to pre-season training. Less understandable, however, is players in top-flight leagues in England, Spain and Germany arranging privately funded fitness programmes during the season. Considering the expertise and facilities available to them at their clubs, why do they feel it’s necessary? And are clubs OK with them going off-piste?

Performance specialist John Phillips has experience of the situation from both sides, having spent 21 years in club football in the Premier League, Championship and in Sweden, Dubai, Russia and China and a year as part of K3 Performance, a company providing private fitness and technical training to elite professionals and academy footballers during the off-season.

“I’ve seen it work well,” he tells The Athletic, speaking specifically about players using private coaches during the season, “but I’ve also seen it work really badly when it interfered with the club function in terms of the private trainer had no idea and no consideration for what the player had done on the pitch that day or the previous day or what was planned for the next day. That’s obviously not optimal for performance preparation.”

During his time working in English football (five years at Southampton and almost seven with Queens Park Rangers), Phillips became increasingly aware of the number of players working with external practitioners who were “not always doing what was probably suitable — year on year it became more of a problem”. Players setting up their own private support teams — which might include anything from a personal nutritionist to an analyst, technical coach and fitness coach — has become so normalised, says football agent Matt Kleinman, that agents are now expected to provide that offering, or have the right contacts for the player to set it up.

“It’s extremely prevalent at the top levels now,” says Kleinman. “If you look at the old Dave Brailsford (director of sport for INEOS, co-owners of Manchester United) philosophy of getting those extra percentages — the one per cent — that’s where it originated from: showing players how they could get an advantage over others. Then you look at someone like Cristiano Ronaldo and a lot of players model themselves on him and how hard he works; how he does extras.”

Those marginal gains, however, can be at odds with what the club wants.

“Sometimes, players will tell the club they want to work on something after training and the club will say no,” says Kleinman, “because they’re monitoring their load and don’t want them doing any more, which you can understand when they have back-to-back games. But it’s tricky: you don’t want them getting injured, but then you don’t want to deter them from being hungry and focused and trying to better themselves either.

“I’ve got two players who are adamant they have to see their S&C (strength and conditioning) guy every week. They have to work with their technical coach and their data analyst every week. It’s one of these things that mentally keeps them sharp and believing they are doing everything right to be the best version of themselves on a matchday. But there are obvious repercussions to those things if they get them wrong.”

In a pre-match press conference ahead of Crystal Palace’s game against Fulham in November, head coach Oliver Glasner was asked about the issue and said: “In this time we are living, most of our players have their own coaches, physiotherapists. On the one side, we like professional players who care about their bodies. But this is a challenge every single club has now, trying to find the best communication.

“Our fitness department and our doctors are always connected with the individual coaches of the players and it’s clear that if someone wants to train we always get the information.”

“There are loads doing it,” says one former head physio at a Premier League club, who now works in a private capacity and spoke anonymously to protect relationships. “But in my opinion, it just further increases their injury risk. It makes those people (private trainers) money and they feed off players who want to work harder. If they work alongside the clubs, then that’s great. But if they don’t communicate, it will only lead to problems.”

Portsmouth’s head of medical, Steve Hard, has experienced the situation both from a medical point of view, when players may have their own private physiotherapists and a fitness one, and says that, while he understands it, the communication side of it can be challenging.

Speaking to The Athletic in a previous article, Hard said: “If the player wants to work with people they have used before they joined the club, all you ask for is that there is communication between the club and that person, whether it’s for fitness or medical, just so we know exactly what the player’s been doing… You’re not dictating, but you want to know what is going on because it could structure what you do the next day.”

Quality control can also be an issue, according to Hard, who previously spent 15 years as head physio at Bournemouth. While some trainers are perfectly suitable, others are less so. “There’s some that are a nightmare,” said Hard. “Then you talk to other clubs and mention a name and they will have had the same problems. It’s just part and parcel of it.”

Former Leicester City full-back Danny Simpson says he used private trainers during the off-season as a player and when he was out of contract, but never in-season. “I’ve never really been sure about that,” he tells The Athletic, “because you’re training every day.

Danny Simpson playing for Leicester in 2016 (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

“If I’m a coach, I would rather my players were only at the training ground so that I have control over what they’re doing. If you have a player who goes off and does an hour somewhere and doesn’t tell you and then comes into training the next day tired, the manager might think he’s been up all night playing PlayStation, when actually he’s been doing extra work. So communication is key.”

However, a player may be secretive about extra sessions because there is a risk it can go wrong. When a player gets injured while in the care of their club, they get all the treatment they need, whenever they need it, and the club pays their wages while they’re unable to play. But what happens if a player gets injured while in the care of a private trainer, meaning the club loses out on the player’s services and arguably has someone else to blame for it?

“(As a private trainer) you’re always an easy target because the club is always going to say, ‘It’s not us, it’s them’,” says Phillips. “Even if you have a good relationship with the club, it’s always going to be nice until something goes wrong and then they’ll say, ‘What did you do?’. And you can’t prove (who’s at fault) either way. It’s a risky business.”

That financial risk is potentially huge. Most personal trainers will have public liability insurance that covers them if a client injures themselves (or alleges an injury has occurred) while under their supervision. But the likelihood of that being enough to cover the cost of a top-flight footballer who is out injured for two months because of something they’ve done under the supervision of a private trainer (Phillips estimates £500,000 at least), is slim to none.

“It’s something that’s bubbling and I think is going to implode at some point,” says Phillips. “There will be a big case where someone gets sued and it will probably end up with only a few people who do it but are set up properly.”

Dr Ben Rosenblatt spent seven years as lead men’s physical performance coach at the Football Association (FA) between 2016 and 2023 before setting up 292 Performance, a company that provides “high performers” with their own support team, including physical coaches, nutritionists, psychologists and data scientists. About 50 per cent of their business comes from elite footballers in the Bundesliga, Serie A, Premier League, Scottish Premier League and Championship. Among those they have worked with are Raheem Sterling, Danny Ings, Rico Henry and Kalvin Phillips.

Rosenblatt set up the company after noticing that clubs and national governing bodies (NGBs) were getting frustrated at the lack of control and quality assurance when players sought external help.

“I also felt that a lot of it was done to self-promote the trainer rather than support the needs of the players,” he tells The Athletic. “I wanted to set up a company that genuinely supports the players over the long term and did that by working really closely with all the people who are involved in their development, be that their agents, management teams, clubs, NGBs, and taking more of a holistic perspective around their long-term development.”

Rosenblatt spent seven years at the FA (292 Performance)

Given that most of 292’s business involves long-term support, their work with players continues throughout the season. But what kind of work can really be done with a player mid-season when they’re playing so many games?

“In reality,” he says, “that might be true for Jude Bellingham or Declan Rice, maybe 10 or 15 players, but the rest of them are fighting to get in the team or the starting line-up. Some of them are only playing once a week. Some of them have been completely ditched out; they have high-asset value for the club but not for the manager, or they will be looking to try and get a move because they’re out of favour.

“Or some are playing very consistently but don’t do any physical preparation because of the manager’s methodology in between fixtures. They want to stay resilient and maintain themselves because that’s what they’re used to doing. But it’s a case-by-case basis. If someone is out there playing 90 minutes two or three times a week then there’s not much you can add other than support them with their recovery.”

Once engaged, 292 hold regular meetings with players’ clubs to share insights and information, at least once a month, and avoid overstepping their role. “We will capture and collect their data, but we’ll never tell a player that they have to take a rest tomorrow or that they need to do more,” says Rosenblatt. ”It’s the club’s responsibility to prepare them for the next fixture and our responsibility to look after them over the longer term.”

His determination to work in harmony with clubs means he turns down business where players have asked to work with 292 without any communication with the club. “If there isn’t any, that’s when things tend to break down. It’s not going to end well for anybody — especially not the player.”

Rosenblatt’s aim is to “set an industry standard” for this private offering to elite athletes, but he admits they cannot insure themselves to the same level as a Premier League club. “That requires a hell of a lot of money coming in,” he says, explaining that they mitigate their risk by the way they work; signing contracts with athletes, working in collaboration with everyone and keeping detailed records.

“So there should never really be a situation where an athlete or team says, ‘You’re liable for X, Y and Z’. We have detailed records of everything that’s gone on and why, every decision that’s been made and how it’s been communicated with everybody.”

The key question behind all of this is, why do players do it?

Among those The Athletic spoke to, there were a range of reasons suggested. Simpson thinks it could be as simple as a need “to get away from the training ground to do some work. You’re there every day with each other, so maybe it’s a mental thing.”

Kleinman says that, beyond the desire to emulate players such as Ronaldo, there is a drop-off in individual care and development that occurs once a player moves from academy level to first team. “Throughout their scholarships, they are training maybe five or six hours a day. When they get beyond that, it’s almost like they’re training two hours a day. There’s very little focus on the individual, on their development and their technical skills.”

That’s something echoed by personal trainer Nathan Palmer — Cole Palmer’s cousin, who has been helping with the Chelsea player’s development since he was 15. “In a club setting, it’s focused around the whole team, rather than just one singular person,” he said in an interview with Sports Gazette. “So if you’ve got that focus on yourself rather than the whole team, then you’re going to get more benefit from actual one-to-one training than you are in a team setting.”

In an Instagram reel posted on his cousin’s Instagram feed last year, Cole Palmer said his training with Nathan “improves a lot of things on the pitch that people don’t see — like your core strength and power. Even if it’s only a few times a week, you can really see the benefits. Any advice I’d give to young players coming up trying to be a professional athlete is, you might not see the benefits straight away but I think working in the gym and doing your stuff off the pitch is really vital to becoming good on the pitch.”

Ronaldo, pictured in 2014, was an early inspiration for footballers finding performance gains in their own time (Lars Baron/Getty Images)

The onus is firmly on self-improvement, with trainers using platforms such as Instagram to spread a powerful message that players need to invest in themselves if they truly want to extract the most from their relatively short careers.

While there is a lot of video and data analysis used in discussions with players, Kleinman says that little of what they’re told they need to improve on is put into practice for the individual in a training session. “So these boys feel like they need to do extras to get that competitive edge: to improve their stats.”

One of the current Premier League players Rosenblatt works with, who has more than 200 appearances and 50 goals (292 don’t share names or images of players they work with unless given express consent for a specific purpose), says it was as he got further into his career that he realised he needed to “do things differently” if he was going to keep playing at the top level for as long as possible.

“The physical demands of football catch up with you, especially when you’ve had a few injuries along the way,” he said. “I knew I needed to look after my body better, manage my training. That’s when I decided to work with Ben and the 292 team.”

Why would a player feel the need to “do things differently” from how they are being done inside their club? Is there an element of distrust or at the very least a lack of belief in the staff at the clubs?

The former head physio The Athletic spoke to suggested it’s simply that some players don’t feel they are being pushed hard enough. “If the individual work they’ve been given is not what they’ve experienced previously to be sufficient for them then they will add bits on,” they said. “So it’s not usually to do with trust, it’s just the fact they feel they’re able to do more or they want to work on certain issues, like their strength.”

Others say trust is a big factor. Kleinman says that football often tends to underpay backroom staff, safe in the knowledge that they will never be short of people who want to do the job. “So the best of the best don’t tend to work at football clubs because they’re not paid in the same way as if they work privately. They pay coaches, medical staff and S&C staff low wages because they feel they’re a dime a dozen; everyone wants to be involved in the game, so we’re doing them a favour rather than the other way around. Eventually, the best get frustrated with it.”

This is something that Phillips sees some truth in.

“People are so desperate to get into football now, particularly English football, that they are prepared to do so much for so little. Everybody has every qualification under the sun but what a lot of them don’t have is experience. There are a lot of cases where people are being put in charge of very expensive assets with potentially not enough experience either to be able to drive performance or challenge things that are maybe inappropriate.

“I don’t know many industries where you would get someone who is being paid £25,000 a year overseeing someone who’s worth £20million-30m, which might not even be a massive name these days.”

For Rosenblatt, one of the key drivers is players searching for consistency and stability in an industry where there is very little of either.

“A player might have a 10-to-20-year career, and they might see how many managers, coaches and fitness staff across that period? But they have a sense of the kind of stuff that works for them so they want some consistency around that. They’re thinking about themselves as an individual and how to maximise themselves for the club.

“Equally, sometimes there is a breakdown of trust or personality clashes like there are in all walks of life, and that stimulates players to look elsewhere.”

When Phillips was working on the club side, he had conversations with several sporting directors about whether players were allowed to work with a private trainer. After all, player contracts often ban things like skiing or riding motorbikes. But Phillips says that they often didn’t see the negative aspect of it: “They just saw a player doing extras; ‘What’s wrong with that?’.”

He’s sensed a shift recently, however. “A number of clubs now are trying to say, ‘We know you’re going to do it, but if you are, then use one of these two or three practitioners who we know and trust’. Because unless you put it in their contracts, I don’t think you’re ever going to stop players from working with their individual coaches.

“My worry is that players are not getting enough rest. We’ve got all the technology, better pitches, better equipment, better boots, recovery and medical knowledge than ever, yet injuries are going up. OK, we’re playing more games, but are they also doing too much? In some respects, probably.”

For Portsmouth’s Steve Hard, it’s clear that players assembling their own support teams is something that is here to stay and that the key is to “make sure everyone’s singing off the same hymn sheet. It can work. It can also be difficult. But I think that’s the way it is going now. The club have their staff, and players have their own staff as well.

“It can be a good thing; can be a bad thing. With anything, it is what you make of it. You can make things easy or hard.”

Additional reporting: Tom Burrows