Understand what it is you’re aiming for. What is it that your club, team, environment, or community sees as success?

This is likely a mix of longer-term, medium-term and short-term goals, and will be informed by a whole range of things, including culture, both of the club and the surrounding area, aims ownership and leadership, beliefs about the game and how it should be played and, central to it all, the players that you have in your care.

What’s important to one club might be winning games. To another, it might be developing players to go on to play in your, or another, first team. To another, it might be playing a style of football that fans enjoy watching and players enjoy playing.

Or, and perhaps more likely, it might be a combination of two of those options, or all three of them.

If you’re entering a new environment, your task may be to make sure you understand what it is the club or team is aiming for. If you’re in an environment you’ve been in for a while, your task may be to ascertain whether what’s been important remains important.

Centring our work around the concept of what’s important enables us to make sure that each action we take is intentional, driving towards our goals.

In the context of pre-season, this ensures that while we are building team cohesion, getting player fitness up to the levels required, and working on technical and tactical elements, all of this is integrated into the bigger picture of what we’re aiming for, and how the ways we play football, develop players, and coach players and the game, contribute to these aims.

Once you know what’s important, you can then connect it to every element of what you do: how your team plays – the principles, strategies and tactics that you use to define this – how you develop individual players within that, and how you then coach your players and the game.

This connection can and should then extend across staff working with a team, teams that make up a club, and beyond.

In order to effectively move in the direction of what’s important, everyone involved must understand what’s important.

In the context of pre-season, this will likely have two elements: understanding and aligning what’s important as a whole; what is it you’re aiming for in the upcoming season, or longer term? And framing this in the context of pre-season; what needs to be achieved in the pre-season period in order to contribute to that overall picture?

What’s measured gets managed. That’s to say that when metrics or reporting is put in place for something, it is given additional focus.

But often, what we measure doesn’t align with what’s important. We may, for example, measure goals scored and goals conceded. Or pass or tackle completion. These are all valid football metrics. But are we picking metrics aligned to what we’ve said is important? What we measure is context-dependent.

If we’ve decided, for example, that winning is important, and within that a key element of our game model, developed around the needs of our players, is to stop attacks quickly in order to start attacks (or counter-attack), rather than simply tracking tackle completion, we may instead look to measure PPDA. PPDA is passes per defensive action, or the number of passes that the defending team allow before they seek to win the ball back, therefore indicating the intensity of the press.

Or, if we’ve decided that player development is important, with a focus on the average age of your first team and the number of players that are in your first team that have progressed through the academy programme, then reviewing data such as age of first-team debut may be more appropriate.

In the context of pre-season, we’re therefore likely looking at what we’re going to measure over the course of the season, what of that we can or should start measuring in pre-season, and what else we might need to measure in pre-season in order to make what we want to measure in the competitive season possible.

For example, if we’re measuring the intensity of the press, how does this align to player fitness levels? What is required in terms of player endurance so they can execute an intense press?

Knowing what’s important, ensuring it’s aligned across approaches, staff and systems, and putting in place metrics in order to measure it, will then allow you to build your plan.

What does your curriculum contain? What do your sessions look like? What does your games programme or schedule look like? How is individual player development factored into all of this? How is all of this built with the collaboration of your staff team?

The football element of your pre-season programme – the sessions you run, the ways you coach, the ways you approach fixtures – should all be reflective of the football element of your core season programme.

For example, if one of the elements key to your player development mission is to expose players to opposition that play different styles of the game, consider how you might begin to do this within your pre-season fixtures.

When it comes to the fitness element of pre-season, if you have a fitness professional within your team, collaboration is key. The more what’s necessary and important in terms of player fitness is weaved into the overall picture of what you’re doing, the better.

Do what you said you were going to do.

Execute the plans you’ve laid out. Hold the meetings, coach the sessions, work on fitness, get the metrics you’ve agreed on, play the games.

Run your pre-season programme as planned, with what’s important underpinning it all.

Aims and plans are necessary. But what’s key alongside them is that we are responsive to the needs of our players.

Centring player needs means being flexible with what we do and how we do it in order to meet the requirements of the players in our care.

That means being open to reviewing what we’re doing, and ensuring it truly does align to what we said was important.

If it doesn’t, it might indicate that we need to refine our plans.

If you’ve developed and executed your pre-season around what’s important, that thread simply continues as you go come to the end of pre-season and enter into the competitive season.

The work you’ve come in pre-season to build towards what’s important will lay the foundations for the work you do as the campaign continues.