Strength work tops the rankings for football performance

Football demands a messy mix of qualities: repeated sprints, direction changes, jumping duels and the aerobic capacity to keep doing all of it for ninety minutes. Coaches therefore face a genuine allocation problem, because training time spent on one modality is time not spent on another. Individual trials tend to test one intervention against a control, which tells you little about how the options rank against each other. This review set out to compare four types of physical training intervention simultaneously and to identify the optimal dosage for each.

The authors systematically searched PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library and OVID for randomised controlled trials examining four exercise-based interventions on soccer performance, covering records from the earliest available through September 2025. Fifty-three RCTs with an aggregated sample of 1,580 participants met the eligibility criteria. Methodological quality was assessed with the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool. The data were then combined in a network meta-analysis, which allows indirect comparisons between interventions that were never tested against each other directly, and results were expressed as SUCRA ranking probabilities across performance outcomes.

Strength training produced the most substantial improvements across most performance indicators. Its SUCRA rankings were 94% for countermovement jump, 87.5% for squat jump, 99.9% for one-repetition maximum squat, 99.6% for the five-metre sprint, 87.4% for the ten-metre sprint, 88.8% for the thirty-metre sprint and 69.4% for agility measured by the T-test. The one clear exception was aerobic capacity: endurance training showed the greatest effect on maximal oxygen uptake, with a SUCRA of 84.7%. The authors' conclusion is that strength training demonstrates superior overall benefits compared with the other exercise interventions examined.

This is consistent with the long-standing view that force production underpins short-distance acceleration and jumping, and it extends that view by ranking modalities within a single statistical network rather than across scattered trials. The agility ranking of 69.4% is notably lower than the sprint and strength rankings, hinting that change-of-direction ability is less exclusively determined by strength. The endurance result is a reminder that no single modality wins everything, and that VO2max responds to the stimulus that specifically targets it. Network meta-analyses inherit the weaknesses of their inputs, so heterogeneity in protocols and risk of bias across 53 trials remain live concerns.

If sprinting, jumping and maximal squat strength are what you care about, this is a reason to think resistance training earns its place at the centre of a programme rather than the periphery. It is equally a reason not to expect strength work to raise aerobic capacity, which tracked with endurance training instead. The population studied was football players, so the transfer to recreational trainees or other sports is an assumption rather than a finding. Rankings describe average probabilities across studies and cannot tell you which modality a specific individual responds to best.},