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Words: Oliver Harsley (@OllieHarsley)

The period between one season finishing and the next one starting can be a drawn out and monotonous affair. You just want to be able to press a button that takes you straight to the opening day of the new campaign without having to go through the pre-season process.

The only real point of pre-season is to give players the opportunity to get back to full fitness and work on tactical changes implemented by both current and new managerial incumbents.

Results don’t matter at all and they shouldn’t even be announced by the clubs themselves.

People get carried away both ways about the outcomes of pre-season friendlies. Teams are made out to be world beaters if they win every game or doomed to be absolutely abysmal if the results go the other way completely. There never seems to be any middle ground where there are calm and measured responses to the matches played.

Of course, you can rightly be concerned if your club effectively downs tools and loses by a staggering margin.

Meanwhile, the lack of patience within some fanbases regarding signings is another annoyance. It’d serve them right if every club refused to announce their signings and just showed them off at the first game of each new season.

The rumour mill goes into overdrive with ITK accounts with one follower thinking they’re Fabrizio Romano. It’s all about click baiting and creating misleading headlines.

In truth, the interesting bit about pre-season is seeing how clubs assemble their squads and how they go about making transfers. This is coupled with the usual managerial merry go round that occurs in the close season.

Some clubs dispense with the services of their manager and either opt for an exotic overseas appointment or someone that’s been there and done it within the English game.

To summarise, the whole pre-season process is needed to an extent. You can’t get rid of it because there has to be some way of distinguishing between seasons and having a break point where players, managers and everyone else can refresh themselves.

Once it’s all done and dusted, we’ll have the 2025/26 season to properly get stuck into and it’s sure to be another exciting campaign.