How Barcelona’s fitness guru got them sprinting to top of LaLiga

Barcelona president Joan Laporta was furious with the way he felt the team faded at the end of big games last season.

Barça lost both Clásicos against Real Madrid to stoppage-time goals, results which if reversed would have flipped the final standings at the top of LaLiga between the two sides. In the UEFA Champions League, they could not live with Paris Saint-Germain after being reduced to 10 players as they exited the competition at the quarterfinal stage.

“The team dipped after the 60th minute physically,” Laporta said at the end of the campaign in an interview with the club’s in-house media. “We did not finish games as we wanted.”

Those results, among other reasons, cost coach Xavi Hernández his job, with Hansi Flick replacing him. However, concurrently and in collaboration with sporting director Deco, Laporta was also working on a complete revamp of the first team’s fitness department.

Barça went after the best specialists in Spain. Julio Tous was appointed as the head of fitness training. Tous has extensive experience in strength and conditioning having previously worked with Antonio Conte at Juventus, Chelsea and with Italy’s national team. He also, very briefly, worked at Barça in 2004 during Laporta’s first term as president.

Rafa Maldonado, Pepe Conde and Germán Fernández followed to make up Tous’ team, joining from Real Sociedad, Sevilla and Udinese respectively. Maldonado and Conde are focused on work on the grass, while Fernández’s role is more gym based, with an emphasis on strength and neuromuscular training.

The results were instant. Barça started the season with seven straight wins in LaLiga after being put through their paces in preseason.

“We work much harder than before,” midfielder Pedri said in September. “The new fitness coaches that have come in are really good for us. You notice it in games. The team doesn’t dip after the 70th or 80th minute, it maintains the same fitness levels.”

There was a poor run before Christmas, but Barça have bounced back in 2025. They are unbeaten in 17 matches and are LaLiga leaders as they head into Sunday’s top-of-the-table clash against Atlético Madrid (stream LIVE at 4 p.m. on ESPN+ in the U.S.). Tuesday’s 3-1 win over Benfica qualified them for a second successive Champions League quarterfinal, too, while they will also meet Atlético for a place in the Copa del Rey final. The Spanish Supercopa has already been won.

With silverware within reach, a narrative is developing of a team that can run more than most and go until the very last minute, which is an important aspect of Flick’s playing style. Key players are also avoiding the muscle injuries which hampered them and the team in previous seasons.

ESPN spoke to people at the club and others who have worked with Tous previously to find out how he’s helped turn a team that failed to win a single trophy last season into one aspiring to win four this year.

As a coach of a team with one of the smallest budgets in LaLiga, Rayo Vallecano boss Iñigo Pérez says the best way to bridge the gap with the top sides is to run more and work harder. The only problem is, under Flick, Barça run as hard as almost anyone. Add in the quality of Lamine Yamal, Raphinha, Pedri et al and it’s a recipe for success.

“What I like most about Flick’s Barça is that he’s been able to convince them to run as much as teams like us,” Pérez said after losing to the Catalan side in February. “In the physical metrics where we stand out — and which I believe earn us a lot of points — they are equal to us, or maybe just behind.”

Pérez was perhaps alluding to sprinting statistics. Barça have played a game less, but they lead LaLiga in sprints (14,367 in 26 matches) and rank second in high-speed sprints (6,872). Only Rayo (7,092) are ahead of them.

Breaking that down per game, Barça average 264.3 high-speed sprints. That’s up from 230.2 last season, while it was as low as 199.6 in 2019-20, which was the final campaign for a side built around the attacking talents of the ageing Luis Suárez and Lionel Messi. Those numbers are the best illustration of how relentless Barça are. Their pressing can smother even the best opponents.

Raphinha’s non-stop running is remarkable. He leads the Champions League in goals (11) and assists (5) and has registered 46 goal contributions in all competitions. Yet he is also Barça’s hardest runner in LaLiga. He averages 38.08 high speed sprints per game (990 in LaLiga this season), up from 23.79 last term. Full-backs Jules Koundé (786) and Alejandro Balde (725) follow him, with Pedri, so often plagued by injuries in recent seasons, always available this year and ranking fourth. He has 502 high speed sprints in LaLiga, an average of 20.24 per game, up from 13.75 last year.

The result is Barça are winning the ball back much higher up the pitch, leading to goals — with 128, no one has scored more than them across Europe’s top five leagues this season. Raphinha, in two fewer appearances, has already made more ball recoveries (77 to 74) and tackles (29 to 14) than last season. Sources close to the first team say that is all possible because of the work done by Tous and his team.

“The intensity of the work increased and many things changed inside the club,” defender Ronald Araújo told ESPN. “In terms of the fitness work and the physiotherapy, all the people who have come in are vital.”

Change was necessary, sources said, not just because of last season’s problems but because of the style of play Flick wanted to implement: intense, pressing high and using a high line in defence.

“It was important that the team runs and competes,” Araújo added. “If one player can’t give any more, another who can also run and compete can come on. For the style of play we want to use — pressing high, running hard, setting the line very high — it is important to have everyone in good shape.”

Flick has also recognised the work done behind the scenes.

“The physical job I don’t do, this is the fitness side, Julio and his team,” he said in February. “They make a fantastic job. Deco made a good job when he planned all the new experts to come in and help us. You can see this.”

Victor Moses laughs when he remembers Tous turning up at Chelsea with Conte in the summer of 2016.

“He brought this equipment with him and every single one of us looked at each other thinking, ‘What is he doing? What are we going to do with this stuff?’,” Moses told ESPN. “It’s a top equipment to be honest, but when he first brought it we didn’t know what it was. We were just laughing.”

Moses and his Chelsea teammates were laughing for a different reason at the end of the campaign after winning the Premier League. The former Nigeria international winger was moved into a more physically demanding wing-back role to fit Conte’s 3-4-3 formation, and he played a key role in that season’s title success.

“That’s probably one of the best years I’ve ever had, you know,” Moses added. “Julio coming in made everything a lot easier. Julio 100% played a really big part. He was the one that kept me fit when I was at Chelsea. He was there 24/7: one-to-ones and work in the gym. He got me fit physically.”

Sources at Barça didn’t want to give too many specific details about Tous’ methods this season, but he was previously an exponent of yo-yo flywheel machines and, more recently, the elastic resistance bands now used so commonly across the game.

Tous, from the Canary Islands, had originally wanted to become a basketball coach before pivoting to strength and conditioning. He studied under Paco Seirul·lo, the fitness guru for Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola’s Barça teams, and transitioned into football. “The student has surpassed the teacher,” Seirul·lo said of Tous recently.

Tous worked with Frank Rijkaard’s Barça side in 2003-04 for six months and was considered one of the reasons for the team’s change in fortunes: from 12th in the table after 18 games to runners-up at the end of the season.

“He introduced the yo-yo machines,” ESPN analyst and former Barça and Liverpool forward Luis García remembered of that campaign. “I worked a lot with [Andrés] Iniesta, a lot of eccentric strength work. I remember the change in Andrés. He worked much more specifically with Julio and the machines. It was an incredible change.

“I have good memories working with Julio and, in fact, when I set up my home gym recently, I looked up yo-yo machines because they worked so well for me.”

After Barça, Tous worked at Sampdoria in collaboration with Roberto Sassi, before remaining in Italy with Juventus and the Italian national team. Sources close to Tous say he loved working in Italy because he found clubs and players more receptive to his methodology. He worked with Giorgio Chiellini, Andrea Pirlo and Arturo Vidal, among others, to great effect and was considered instrumental in helping produce the best version of Paul Pogba, in terms of performance but also reducing injuries.

Tous later followed Conte to Chelsea. There was reluctance from the players at first, especially given the type of work had not previously been mandatory, but they soon took his ideas on board. His primary aim was for the fitness, strength and injury prevention work to be as closely assimilated to in-game movements and situations as possible. That often meant involving the ball — inside and outside.

“Once we started working with his equipment, you could tell the difference,” Moses said. “It was it was a lot better than what we were used to. Julio will put you through what needs to be done and how he needs to do it. You just concentrate and listen to him.

“I started using the bands through Julio. I’d never used them before until he came to Chelsea. Nowadays a lot of clubs use them, so it shows how he was way ahead of everyone else. He was using the ball a lot as well in the gym and outside as well, because sometimes the equipment that he brought in we used in the gym, but the same equipment can be used outside as well. You use the combination of the football as well to mix it up.”

Tous also worked with Conte at Tottenham Hotspur and Inter Milan, where he would be reacquainted with Moses, before joining Barça last summer.

“Julio is a phenomenal man,” Moses said. “I was buzzing when I got the chance to work with him again at Inter. I couldn’t wait.”

Keeping players injury free is not luck, even if bad fortune can sometimes play a part. It is science. It is also a large part of Tous’ work at Barcelona and, in comparison to recent years at the club, another area where his team have so far excelled heading into the business end of the season.

“I can’t say that we will eradicate injuries completely, but it’s clear in both experience and at research level that the reduction of injuries with our type of training is drastic,” he said in an interview with Barça One at the start of the season. “I’m talking a 50% reduction in comparison to nothing being done [to combat injury prevention].”

Tous’ methods prepare the muscles to withstand more and more breaks and shocks. There is a responsibility on each individual player, too. Sources say he constantly reminds the squad they should do at least one thing every day with injury prevention in mind.

Pedri is the best example of the results being reaped. The Spain international missed 25 games for club and country last season and has suffered repeated muscle injuries since his breakout season in 2020-21. Not only is he now available for every game, he’s the Barça player covering the most distance per match on average at 10.8km. Sources told ESPN part of the advice, in addition to the work done off the pitch, was that it was better for Pedri to be in the rhythm of regular matches, rather than stopping and starting with the idea he needed rest.

In the midweek win over Benfica, he was the player tracking back to make a brilliant recovery tackle midway through the first half. It led to the whole Olympic Stadium chanting his name. “What he is doing off the ball is unbelievable,” Flick said.

Iñigo Martínez ranks second at 10.5km. He is another player who had a series of muscle injuries last season. Apart from a minor injury in January, when he missed six games in a three-week period, he has remained fit throughout the entire campaign.

At this stage of the previous season when Barça faced Napoli in the Champions League Balde, Frenkie de Jong, Gavi, Pedri, Ferran Torres and Marcos Alonso were all missing. In the corresponding fixture against Benfica this week, Andreas Christensen was the only player missing with a muscle injury. He is perhaps the exception to the rule as the only player who has not yet been able to get fit. Also absent were long-term absentees Marc-André ter Stegen and Marc Bernal.

It has laid the foundations for Flick’s style of play to prosper and for Barça to still be fighting on all three fronts as April slowly moves into view. However, the hard work is only just beginning. More competitions means more games and Tous, as well as Flick and Barça, will be judged more harshly for anything that happens in the next two months than they have for anything in the previous nine months.

Sunday’s trip to Atlético, one of the few teams they have failed to beat this season, provides the next opportunity for Barça to show Laporta they won’t fade when it matters this year.