No. They’re just a marketing exercise to sell tickets to glory hunters from other countries that don’t prepare the team for the season ahead in any way whatsoever.
The way pre-seasons run they actually hinder rather than prepare teams for the season. Pre-season should be about the players but it’s not about the players in any way shape or form. It winds me up every year!
If you could think up the absolute worst way to prepare a sports team for a new season, you’d say: get the players on flights to and from places thousands of miles away, spending more time on planes than training, and playing a minimal amount of football games often on shit pitches (one year we came back with Yaya and Delph getting injured on a baseball pitch).
But that’s exactly what Prem teams do for pre-season every year.
You wouldn’t believe that the Premier League is the pinnacle sports league in the world with the most valuable sports stars in the world. The players are treated like they're nothing by clubs in pre-season with bare minimum physical preparation for the new season.
Pep asked for and was given control of his first pre-season with Bayern. They played eleven games, all in Germany. Tells you all you need to know about what Pep thinks about these stupid tours.
