Julio Tous joined Barcelona as head of physical preparation. He had publicly promised to cut injuries by half, and by October 2025, the list of muscle injuries had become alarming.
By March, most players were losing trust in his methods, with Robert Lewandowski, Frenkie de Jong, Raphinha, Dani Olmo and Andreas Christensen all hit by muscle problems during the season.
A group of prominent players wanted new approaches to physical preparation and less reliance on outside professionals paid from their own pockets.
In May, Hansi Flick had asked the club for a new fitness coach and was still waiting for approval.
That is the setting for the news that the new gym at the Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper is almost finished.
Read alone, it is a facilities item: a larger room beside the Camp Tito Vilanova pitch, built because the old gym inside one of the complex’s buildings had become too small.
Read against the previous thirteen months, it is the last physical piece of an overhaul that began with people rather than concrete, and the order in which those pieces arrived explains what Barcelona expect the building to do.
The people came first.
Benjamin Kugel spent almost a decade on the German FA’s coaching staff alongside Flick and was part of the 2014 World Cup win.
Flick proposed the job about two weeks before preseason, and Kugel had been without a team for two years.
Kugel moved to Barcelona with his family and attends every training session, while Tous came to the training ground only one or two days.
Tous kept his salary as coordinator of the club’s sports performance optimisation area.
The method followed.
After two months, players noticed the biggest change in strength training, the area where they had felt most lacking the previous season, with resistance bands taking a back seat and weights gaining influence.
Heavier strength work needs room and equipment, and the old gym sat inside an existing building that reports say no longer met the first team’s needs in conditioning, recovery and individual work.
The likely connection is that the new building is infrastructure catching up with a method already in use. That is an inference, not something the club has stated.
The building also had a price.
Reports put the planned first-team residence at roughly €12m to €14m against an initial budget of €6m, and the board shelved it in favour of the gym.
Flick had pushed for the residence because he reinstated the practice of keeping the squad together before certain matches, including some home games. In effect, the club funded the cheaper of Flick’s two requests first. The gym’s works have been ongoing for roughly four months.
The schedule has moved as well.
In early October, reports stated that the gym would be in use before the end of that month. The latest reports now say work remains, mainly equipment installation, and the club expects the first team to have access within weeks, with an opening right after the international break. A slip of a few weeks is minor, but it shows that even an approved request took longer than first advertised.
Opening day will not settle anything. Flick’s approach relies on pressing and tracking back, which demands very high fitness. The real measure of the gym is therefore the winter injury list, the one that went wrong last season.
The glass walls matter on that test, because they give a clear view of the training pitch and the gym lets staff combine field sessions with specific strength, flexibility and speed work, so a player can move between the two without leaving the coaches’ sight. If the injury list shortens, the building will have done its job. If it stays long, Barcelona will own a better room around the same problem, with the residence still waiting its turn.
