5 Takeaways from the Football Fitness Federation Conference 2026
Takeaways from the floor.
The Football Fitness Federation conference at UA92 Manchester, in the company of heads of performance, sports scientists and educators from across the UK and beyond, distilled into the five ideas that kept coming back.
A space for education and excellence without boundaries.
The 2026 Football Fitness Federation conference took place last week at University Academy 92 in Manchester, a third-level institution set up in conjunction with the Class of ’92. A place for people to educate themselves and to grow, with no boundaries on background. A dedicated space for education and excellence.
It was a fitting location. The first thing that was obvious on arrival was the calibre of both speaker and attendee, with heads of performance from clubs around the UK and abroad in the room and on the stage.
Des Ryan, Jamie Goldsmith, Stacey Emmonds, Matt Banks and Alan Murdoch were just some of the names in attendance, generously giving their knowledge and their time, all with the aim of sharing and educating.
The athlete comes first.
It sounds simple, but it came back in different forms, from different people.
Leicester City’s Jordan Tyrer spoke about rehabilitation not as the process of treating an injury, but of developing an athlete who is injured. Simple changes like getting the ball involved early, keeping the player connected to what they do and who they are, having a sense of their mood and feelings toward training, and folding that into the now widely-accepted data-led approach, were promoted as effective practices in his work.
Arsenal Academy nutritionist Tanya Kumar framed nutrition education as something that has to be built around the individual athlete and their circumstances, from childhood through to professional life.
The FA’s Senior Lead of Performance Education, Stacey Emmonds, spoke about the female athlete and the importance of understanding her specifically. Not through the lens of general-population research or media narratives, but as an individual with her own physiology, her own cycle, her own response to training.
Systems and protocols are useful starting points. The core skill is always in understanding the person in front of you.
There is a gap between the data and the pitch, and it matters.
This was probably the most honest conversation of the conference, and it surfaced in more than one session.
Performance departments and coaching staff don’t always speak the same language, and bridging that gap is one of the more persistent challenges in the professional game.
Crystal Palace’s Head of Sports Science Jamie Goldsmith spoke about the importance of keeping football at the centre of everything a performance department does. He spoke about the discipline required to constantly reorient around the sport and the result, rather than the department’s own internal logic.
Liam Connor, Head of Performance at Newcastle United Women, spoke about knowing when to lead and when to step back. About the performance department’s role being one of support and contribution in certain moments, and clear direction in others.
The data is only useful if it informs decisions the people making them actually trust and understand.
Human skills make the difference.
Across the sessions on rehabilitation, sports science, performance nutrition and problem solving, the same idea kept surfacing in different ways.
The tools available to practitioners are more sophisticated than they have ever been. The data is richer. The technology is more capable.
And yet the ability to read an athlete, to read a room, to make a good decision in a complicated moment remains the thing that separates good practitioners from great ones.
Tyrer made the point in the context of rehab. Goldsmith in the context of recovery management and working within a club environment. Connor in the context of problem solving and decision making.
It was not a rejection of science or data. It was an acknowledgement that the quality of the human judgement sitting behind the tools is what determines how useful they actually are.
AI is already part of the work.
A session on day two made this clear in concrete terms.
Carl Vandenbussche, Performance Coach at Club Brugge, explained how AI tools are being used to model players’ circadian rhythms and plan training around fixture timing, accounting for how different individuals respond to sessions at different times of day.
Mo Dabbah, CTO at Como 1907, was straightforward about where things are heading: professionals who aren’t beginning to engage seriously with AI now will find themselves left behind.
Equally clear, though, was that the practitioners making the best use of these tools are those who already understand their athletes well. Those who know what questions to ask and can recognise when the output doesn’t reflect the reality in front of them.
The technology is only as good as the thinking applied to it.
Individualisation is no longer optional.
This thread ran through almost every session, in some form.
Stacey Emmonds spoke about the variation between individuals in menstrual cycles, making the case for precise physiological monitoring as a result.
Alan Murdoch spoke about individualising rehabilitation programmes based on detailed biomechanical and musculature analysis using tools like Springbok to understand each athlete’s physical profile in depth.
Tanya Kumar spoke about nutrition education adapted not just to the individual athlete, but to their age, their family environment, and their stage of development.
What works for the group is a floor, not a ceiling. The gap between a good programme and a great one is usually found in how well it is tailored to the individual it is designed for.
The athlete is the starting point.
Everything else is in service of them.
From rehab to nutrition, from data dashboards to AI models, the practitioners at FFF 2026 all hold the same simple discipline; keep the athlete at the centre of every decision.
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