Music at 140 Beats Per Minute in Maresca's Training: Awakening or Illusion?

Before training begins, before the players touch a ball, another kind of sound takes over the training ground space. Music. Not gentle background music for relaxation, but fast, driving tracks turned on just as the players walk out of the dressing room and kept going through the warm-up. Then, when head coach Enzo Maresca starts setting up complex tactical patterns, the volume drops, sometimes to silence. The detail is small, but it says a lot about how a coaching staff designs a training environment, and about the limits of what we can infer from it.

In the story being discussed, Maresca appears as Manchester City head coach. I place that information in the category that still needs verification, because his working history, from Parma to Leicester City to Chelsea, and Pep Guardiola's position at Manchester City are facts already on record. Even so, the part worth analysing here is not the name, but the method: using music as a psychological activation tool in training. That is what can be dissected with science and observation.

At Leicester and Chelsea, Maresca says he used this approach. The goal he states is simple: to create a positive atmosphere before entering a large volume of work. A few players are quoted as enthusiastic. Matheus Nunes and Erling Haaland are among them. This is the first signal, and also the thinnest, because a player's praise during one session has never been a measure of performance on matchday.

In fact, this is not the first time English football has touched music as an environmental variable. Scott Parker used music in training at Burnley. Arsenal once recreated the singing of You'll Never Walk Alone in a session to simulate the Anfield atmosphere. The difference is this: Arsenal used it as a single shock before a specific match; Maresca uses it as a daily habit. One is a dose, the other is a regimen.

That is why I want to pause here longer than usual. Behind the story of a coach letting players be DJ lies a much bigger question: can the training environment be designed to optimise players' psychological state, and if so, where is the evidence? A training ground is not just a place to build fitness. It is a statement about how a club wants to live.

The most quotable piece of evidence is a 2026 study in Hanover, Germany. In that experiment, players played ten-minute five-a-side matches, reviewed by experts, under two different audio conditions. When fast music at around 140 beats per minute was played, the research team recorded improvement in some coordination and perceived-performance measures. The story spread as scientific proof for Maresca's method.

But the data must be read carefully, not to reject it, but to place the right weight on it. The sample was small. The context was five-a-side football in a lab, not a Premier League match with contest intensity, spatial pressure and thousands of decisions per minute. More importantly, the study was funded by an audio equipment brand, a detail that does not make it wrong, but is enough to make one grateful for reading to the final line. For me, this is a brick, not the whole wall. A small, commercially sponsored study cannot be the foundation for a training regime in a top league.

So if the science is not strong enough, why is this detail still worth our attention?

Because the most interesting part is not the music, but where the music is turned off. Maresca lowers the volume when entering complex tactical drills. This is a football decision, not a musical one. It shows he is separating two training phases with different cognitive demands. The activation phase: the body needs arousal, heart rate needs to rise, the mind needs to be pulled out of the morning's dormant state. The cognitive phase: the brain needs bandwidth, and any excess stimulus is noise.

In other words, Maresca does not treat music as a fixed dose, but as a variable that can be switched on and off according to the training phase. That is systems thinking, not random preference. And if you read beneath the raw data, I find the first brick of a methodological generation, and it sits here, not in the number 140 beats.

The mechanism behind it is fairly familiar in sports psychology. Fast music can affect arousal level, breathing rhythm and movement tempo before training. It does not make a player run faster in a match, but it can help them enter the session faster, with less psychological resistance, especially during dense fixture periods, when the body is tired and the head needs to be tricked first.

And it is here that I want to connect this to a position I continue to hold: fixture density is the biggest culprit behind injuries. When a team plays two matches a week, no medical staff can compensate for that volume. But a training environment designed to reduce psychological stress, so players enter drills with less inner resistance, may be an indirect preventive measure worth considering. It does not save a tendon, but it can reduce friction in the head. The home ground was once a fortress, and the pandemic taught us that a fortress is only a variable. The training environment is the same: it is not a fixed foundation, but a variable that can be dialled up or down.

The second detail, and to me the smartest one, is the right to be DJ. Players choose the music. It sounds small, but in a world where everything from meal times, sleep times, running volume to the number of ball touches is decided by the coaching staff, handing the musical steering wheel to the players is a cheap but effective act of empowerment. Empowerment through a playlist costs far less than a team meeting, yet its psychological effect can be comparable. This is management theory, not tactical theory, but in a football team the two are always interwoven.

However, I must remind myself of a familiar trap: seeing one brick and thinking you have seen the whole wall. A few words of praise from Nunes and Haaland are the signal of a positive opinion cycle, not a signal of performance. A player happy about choosing the music does not mean he will pass more accurately or defend better at the weekend. Those quotes only tell us that the dressing room is comfortable in the short term. That state can change in one defeat.

And this is where the data is suspiciously silent. No xG. No PPDA. No formation diagrams. No process metric at all to compare the method with results. The whole story rests on anecdote and one small experiment. When process data is absent, every conclusion about effectiveness is only a hypothesis dressed up in belief.

The counter-intuitive point here is this: the method may be scientifically sound while still failing in football terms. And it may have weak evidence while still succeeding in results. These two axes are independent, and elite football has hundreds of examples for both.

The biggest risk is not in the music, but in the media narrative around it. A positive story about a new coach and environmental techniques easily becomes a double-edged sword. If results are good, it is mentioned as a leadership charm. If results are bad, that same detail is flipped into evidence of a lack of seriousness, phrased as a coach worrying more about DJing than tactics. Journalists and fans have very good selective memory. The same fact, two readings, depending on the standings.

This pushes us to a question about independent thinking. Should a coach chase a new management trend, or chase evidence? In this case, the evidence is too thin to say the method produces wins. But a lack of evidence is also not enough to reject it. The correctness lies in attitude: treating it as a hypothesis to be tested over months, not a conclusion to be performed over weeks.

One detail must be mentioned because it places the whole story in the right frame of reliability. If the assumption about Maresca's role as Manchester City head coach is not solid, then the entire club-level reading loses its anchor. I do not build conclusions about a club merely because a report is circulating. That is the minimum principle of anyone working with data: verify first, analyse second. For someone writing about youth development and systems, a coach changing jobs has never been the starting point of a conclusion.

And here I allow myself to repeat something learned years ago: never use a short run of form to declare something about a person. I once wrote that Mbappé would be crowned after the 2026 World Cup group stage, then had to correct myself when Uruguay built a low defensive block with nearly eight players behind the ball and erased every gap behind the back line. That lesson applies here intact. One month of training with music says nothing about a season.

If I had to bet on a probability, I would say this: the chance that the music method creates a small, indirect advantage, not directly measurable through the scoreboard, is higher than the chance it becomes a tactical turning point. Its real value may lie in making a tired group feel more comfortable walking onto the training pitch, a small thing, but not at all trivial over a long season.

The question I leave is not whether music helps Manchester City win. The question is: if we accept that the psychological environment can be designed, then what percentage of an elite training session is really the work of the head, rather than the legs? And if the answer is larger than the number we usually admit, then the most undervalued thing in modern football may not be fitness, but atmosphere.