Barcelona players question training intensity amid mounting injury crisis

Barcelona’s injury surge has turned into a deeper argument about how the club prepares its players. Inside the dressing room, some players have begun to question whether the physical work at Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper is intense enough, and several have started adding private sessions with personal trainers outside the club’s routine to make up the difference.

The timing could hardly be worse. Barcelona had as many as 10 players sidelined before El Clásico in October 2025, and the club was already under pressure ahead of matches against Girona and Real Madrid. Hansi Flick acknowledged in late September that Barcelona were doing everything possible to manage the injuries and said the situation was “not normal” so early in the season. By mid-October, staff were reviewing training loads and physical-preparation methods to understand why the problems were piling up.

What makes the frustration sharper is how recently Barcelona’s conditioning work was being held up as a success. In 2024-25, the club recorded only 20 injuries, its best mark since before the pandemic, and the turnaround was credited to Julio Tous, Pepe Conde and Germán Fernández, along with Flick’s willingness to adapt. Tous, who spent nearly a decade working with Antonio Conte at Juventus, Chelsea, Inter and the Italian national team, had defended Barcelona’s physical model in August 2024 by stressing daily injury-prevention work and the goal of preparing players to handle a full match at high intensity.

That is why the current mood feels like a reversal rather than a routine fitness complaint. Early in the 2025-26 season, reports echoed on RAC1 said some players believed training had been kept deliberately light to avoid early fatigue, but that the trade-off was too little strengthening work. Later, Barcelona were said to rank 15th in La Liga for distance covered, averaging 113.4 kilometres per match, below the league average of 115. Earlier in the Flick era, some players had even stopped using personal trainers because club sessions were considered demanding enough. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way, and the club’s own methods are being judged against outside work.

That shift points to a system problem, not just locker-room impatience. Barcelona’s pressing game depends on endurance, repeated sprints and sharp recovery, and if players no longer trust the balance between load, recovery and competitiveness, the issue reaches beyond one injury crisis. It goes to the heart of whether the current preparation model is still fit for a team expected to play at elite intensity every three days.