What to expect during the first pre-season sessions under Andoni Iraola later this month
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND - JUNE 04: (THE SUN OUT, THE SUN ON SUNDAY OUT) Andoni Iraola new manager of Liverpool Football Club at Axa training centre on June 04, 2026 in Liverpool, England. (Photo by Nikki Dyer - LFC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Andoni Iraola will be working his Liverpool players hard in pre-season(Image: Getty Images)
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The day the Liverpool squad dread more than any other is nearing, with the first pre-season session now less than a fortnight away.
Andoni Iraola will be the face to greet the players at the AXA Training Centre on July 13 as the squad get set for a new era and a fresh direction after two years under Arne Slot.
Slot considerably changed the pre-season setup during his time in charge compared to what was traditionally undertaken when Jurgen Klopp was in place.
The iconic German coach had eight summers at the helm, meaning some of his infamous drills became the stuff of nightmares, particularly under famed taskmaster Andreas Kornmayer, the former head of conditioning.
Pre-season schedules are, by their nature, designed to be intense and the idea is that the hard yards of the summer will pay off when the going gets tough later on in the season itself.
Liverpool, under Klopp, liked to push their players to the maximum to allow them to implement their famously pressing style on the pitch.
First-team typically stars undergo a series of tests when reporting back after summer, including blood, body fat, concussion, balance and heart scans before being put to work.
Under Klopp, Liverpool also had the lactate test, which was a brutal exercise which tested the players’ aerobic endurance and measured their lactic acid levels.
Players were instructed to run around one of the Kirkby pitches and at a series of intervals, blood tests would be taken to test for levels of lactic acid. If a player was above a certain amount, they would then drop out.
The now retired James Milner was typically the victor during his time at Anfield before Mohamed Salah came out on top in 2023 following the vice-captain's departure.
Andy Robertson's first memories as a Liverpool player are shaped - and in fact scarred - by his experience of the lactate acid test in the summer of 2017, shortly after he signed from Hull City.
Speaking in an interview with Open Goal in 2018, the left-back detailed how the examination caused him to be sick on the first day of his Liverpool career as he struggled to keep pace.
“It’s horrible, running round the pitch, I’m doing it with Danny Ings and that," said Robertson. “My medical went on for two days – it was quite a long medical – so I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t doing this and that. I was fit, because I had three weeks at Hull and I was looking after myself.
“So I’m taking the lactate test and I’m thinking, ‘my stomach’s a bit dodgy here’. I started gagging and I was sick everywhere.
"Halfway around I had to stop and be sick, then I tried to catch them up because I’m thinking, ‘I can’t drop out at this point’, because this point was like you are super unfit, that was the point you had to get by.
“So I was sick around the pitch, then I had to stop because they have to take the blood out your ear, and I was sick when I was getting my blood taken. I went another lap and I was like ‘I need to stop.'"
It even earned the Scotland an unwanted nickname from Klopp in his fledgling days as a Reds player, with Robertson later adding: "Luckily the gaffer wasn’t there and I thought I’d got away with it and he returned three days later and introduced himself, blah blah blah, and then he called me 'Mr. Sick Boy' or something like that. I was gutted!"
Under Slot, Liverpool changed from the aforementioned lactate test to a Six-Minute Race Test (6MRT). The endurance exam, as the name indicates, lasts for six minutes around a 400m race track with the exercise designed for those undertaking it to go as fast as possible to cover somewhere between 1.5 and 2km. "Go all in," Slot told his players when it was introduced in 2024.
After Sepp van den Berg won the opening day's race, Salah, in his first session under Slot, then pipped his colleagues to the crown on day two. This gave an early indication of the condition the Egyptian was in for the 24/25 term, when his goals fired the club to their 20th league title.
Liverpool have made it clear that appointing Iraola to a two-year deal aims to reinstate a more front-footed and aggressive approach, meaning the days of exacting sprints and double sessions could return to the agenda.
Iraola will arrive at the AXA Training Centre with a new-look backroom staff in place, with Tommy Elphick, Shaun Cooper and analyst Tom Webber all signing on alongside the former Bournemouth coach.
It is the addition of fitness coach Pablo de la Torre, however, that will likely have the biggest influence early on for the returning players.
"The way [Iraola] structured the weeks, we didn’t really have any days off, nothing," now Manchester City winger Antoine Semenyo revealed back in April. "It’s very hard going from having Wednesday and Sunday off to having no days off.
“We would play on the Saturday, train on Sunday. The players that were in the starting XI would do like the first maybe 30, 40 minutes of the session, so you’re hanging, your legs have gone.
“You’re doing the possession, you have to run around, you’re thinking ‘oh dear!’. Even now it hasn’t changed. Some of the boys are like, ‘No day off this week again,’ in the group chat. It still hasn’t changed!”
The opening days of pre-season under Iraola are said to typically include strength and power assessments alongside cardiovascular tests, mobility screenings and even body composition analysis.
These will be carried out by the club’s performance and medical teams to evaluate the physical condition of each player ahead of a change in style, one that aims to bring back levels of intensity into Liverpool's game that had patently faded across the course of a difficult campaign last year under Slot.
With a week between the first day and the flight out to the United States for the three-game tour of Nashville, New York and Chicago, a behind-closed-doors game may even be arranged too.
Last year, the Reds beat Stoke City comfortably, away from the cameras and a game with Preston North End was also organised in 2024. Slot's Reds lost 1-0 thanks to Robbie Brady's wonder-goal.
Iraola has been known to do similar at Bournemouth meaning an extra friendly may appear on the to-do list. It's the week the players fear - and for good reason.
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