How the Running Culture of Annecy Shapes Training at FC Annecy

Named France’s sportiest city in 2025 and renowned as a land of running, particularly trail running, Annecy  also has a football club that has been competing at a professional level again (Ligue 2) since 2022. 

To compete at this level, the club has decided to focus its training methods and style of play on what makes the city strong and on its identity: running. 

Why? 

With the 17th lowest squad market value among the 18 clubs in the division (transfermarkt), the club chose to focus on the physical aspect to compete with other clubs.

The mindset of FC Annecy is simple: you can have better technical players, we will have the physically strongest players. 

In other words, the more the players run and sprint, the better their chances of staying at this level. 

In this way, Head of Performance Stan Krug focuses his trainings on three main KPIs : total distance, sprint distance and high speed running (HSR), in order to become the most athletically prepared team in the league. 

The Running Philosophy: Training Application 

Weekly training structure is primarily based on running volume and high performance targets :  Starting the week (MD+3, intensive session) with two sessions, the team already reaches a high volume in terms of total distance.

On MD-3 (extensive day), the aim of the session is to reach match like targets, with particular attention to HSR and sprint exposure.  Positional demands also influence the three main KPIs, and their targets. 

Table 1 shows typical training metrics for MD+3 and MD-3 for a centre-back, a midfielder and a striker.  

Despite having already two big first days of training during the week, MD-2 is also based on two training sessions, with the objective of getting the players used to training under fatigue, and to keep running, while being careful not to expose them to injury risk. 

Regarding player conditioning, specific care is taken to address  volume building  and aerobic adaptive response during pre-season and in-season. By having a high number of training sessions and exposing players to high running demands during the week, Stan tries to see football also as a long-distance endurance sport.

In 2025/26, the club worked with STATSports to complement its existing GPS metrics with heart-rate-based training zones, a method commonly used across endurance sports, to more precisely target specific physiological adaptations in training.

To prepare players for this typical in-season weekly training load, off-season heart rate Zone 2-Zone 3 running is mandatory and the pre-season load is typically very high, especially during the first four weeks with a strong focus on the total distance covered every week and the progressive implementation of the sprinting ability. 

During the winter break, players have to run three or four times a week at low speed, with the aim of rebuilding aerobic capacity. When they come back to training, players have to endure a second pre-season that lasts two to three weeks, even when the official games are back. 

Implementation of STATSports Technology 

GPS Targets and Live Feedback 

From this perspective, Stan pays attention to individual targets based on each player’s best in-game performances. Each training day has their own targets.

During each training session, live GPS feedback and individual thresholds are used on Sonra (as seen below).

More specifically, Stan communicates with the coaching staff before the training starts about the total distance, HSR and sprint distance required and adjustments are made during the session using the live data : adding or removing one sequence of a drill, focusing on one player that already has high metrics and sometimes stopping him before the end of the session, comparing each player for each position and providing additional stimulus for players with the lowest outputs. 

By doing this, the staff can ensure each player reaches a sufficient amount of running distance, sprints, accelerations and decelerations.

Top-ups or extras can be used if a player has not reached their metrics targets. 

Training Load Management and Injury Prevention 

By having this kind of high physical training method, Stan and the coaching staff have to ensure players have the optimal training load without being injured. 

As mentioned earlier, the live feedback plays a big role part in preventing overload for each training.

Another key aspect is also player weight management. Like every endurance athlete, each additional pound can lead to a higher power demand and can often lead to an injury and/or a lower performance. In this objective, players are weighed twice a week (MD+3 and MD-2). 

The Acute/Chronic workload ratio is also used to prevent overtraining/undertraining and to make sure that the training load is sufficient enough to limit the risk of injury and to create positive training adaptations for each player.