Pre-season is hugely important, especially to City with Pep's intricate tactical game but also for any teams with new managers.
Pre-season allows managers to train the team in new formations and tactics, tweak players roles within those tactics and allow new players to settle in to a new squad that may have new ways of playing compared to what they have been used to.
Building the fitness is a big part of it but I genuinely believe that the biggest role pre season has is to allow the manager to fine tune and retrain his team without the pressure of playing a game every three days. During the season we would have had very little chance to work on the tactical side of the game as we would have been mainly working on recovery and pre-game preparation.
The games abroad are just a tiny part of the whole pre-season process, the most important work happens outside of these 2 hour friendlies.
Having players go from having a couple of weeks off then straight into a new season is a really, really difficult way of approaching a new season and it's no surprise ourselves and United both struggled for rhythm and full fitness for the first few months.
That's not to minimise the impact of Dias though, obviously he has been huge for us but I think if we had a proper pre-season then we would have seen a lot more impact from Torres as he would have had more time to integrate into the team and get used to our way of playing.
I think next season will be the same unfortunately, I don't think there's a lot of time between the Euros ending and the season starting so it may be the same again. I certainly don't expect any new players we sign this summer to hit the ground running.
