For almost 150 years, football matches have generally been built around 90 minutes of regulation time. Pre-season, though, is increasingly becoming a place for clubs to test something different.
On Sunday, Liverpool will play 180 minutes against Como across two games, one at noon locally and one at 6pm at Anfield. It is the latest example of a broader trend in which clubs are using shortened or split friendly formats to prepare for the demands of the season ahead.
Why clubs are moving away from one full friendly
The logic is straightforward. Players return from summer breaks with a base level of fitness, and pre-season is designed to build stamina while balancing intensity and volume. A standard 90-minute friendly does not always allow clubs to give enough players the right work, or the right mix of work, within one match.
Glen Driscoll, the former performance analyst at Liverpool, Celtic and Leicester City, said it has always been a challenge to achieve rounded squad fitness within a normal 90-minute pre-season game. He added that the closer clubs get to the season, the more they create a divide between the players being prepared to start and everyone else.
That creates a problem for staff. Once the game is over, they still need to find a way to get the rest of the squad more work, and that is not always simple when supporters are in the stadium, security is in place or travel plans are already underway.
Driscoll also noted that clubs do not want half the squad feeling as if they have already been identified as non-starters before the season even begins. Split matches and shorter friendlies offer a cleaner way to spread minutes, manage morale and keep the whole group involved.
How the schedule is changing
This is not an isolated experiment. Earlier this month, Leeds United and RB Leipzig played a 120-minute friendly split into two 60-minute matches. In July, the A23 Cup was scheduled to take place between Slough Town, Hayes and Yeading United and Marlow Town. Last Saturday, Nottingham Forest and Barcelona met in a triangular one-day tournament with 45-minute games.
The formats vary, but the aim is similar: give coaches more control over playing time and workload before competitive football starts. Rather than treating pre-season as a single 90-minute test, clubs are breaking it into smaller parts that better reflect the job of building a full squad.
Anton McElhone said that in the first four weeks, players would be expected to cover around 30 kilometres of match running, while some clubs may push towards 40km. That helps explain why pre-season planning now looks so different from a normal in-season fixture, where EFL and top-flight sides in continental Europe aim for around 30 kilometres of match running per week.
For clubs, the key challenge is not just getting through a friendly. It is using that friendly to build fitness, avoid overloading players and make sure the entire squad is ready when regular 90-minute games begin again.
