WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027 Training Guide: Plans, Drills and Training Scope

Training in WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027 is not a list you set once — it is a budget your wage bill quietly decides. A club with three drills a week can be fit or it can be tactically sharp, but it cannot be both. This page takes the Trainingsplanung screen apart: what the three scopes Amateur, Halbprofi and Profi really change, which drills exist, what a drill card tells you when you hover it, how weekly plans are saved and named, and what training groups are for. Freshness, rotation and injuries are handled in the medical and injuries guide, bite and satisfaction in the morale and satisfaction guide — this page is about the plan itself — the week around it, from the Wochenstart screen to the Wochenplanung and the Terminplaner, is the weekly schedule guide’s territory.

How Does the Training Scope Work in WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027?

The tutorial’s author needed a long time to pin this down, because the rule was not in the manual when he started: he assumed the constantly shifting plan was a bug, wrote to developer Gerald Köhler, and the answer turned out to be a salary formula. So open the squad, sort by Gehalt p.J. (annual salary) and count.

The screenshot lists eleven players at 25,000 € or above (40,000, 36,000, 34,000, then 32,000 twice, 30,000, 28,000 three times, 25,000 twice) — and that is exactly why this club is still on the amateur plan. The thresholds, as played out and counted on camera:

A professional counts as two semi-professionals. The workaround is the real training tactic: to climb the table in the fifth division you have to raise salaries — the tutorial extends contracts and bumps pay purely to move from three drills a week to seven. Why the table ends the season with the semi- and full-professional clubs on top explains itself from that table.

The training screen: two tabs, fourteen slots

Along the top sit the tabs Trainingswoche (week plan) and Trainingsgruppen (training groups); below them, seven days in two rows. Every card has the same anatomy: a Belastung (workload) header, the drill name, the two or three things it trains, a group-size icon, a five-dot row, a player-selection dropdown (here Alle, everyone) and, underneath, the intensity you step up and down with the two arrows.

The professional week in the shot is a ready-made fitness plan pulled from the Fertige Wochen dropdown (visible bottom right), not something he built: Schnelles Umschaltspiel three times with the entries Pässe and Konter, Sechsfelderschach twice with short passes, Ausdauerlauf twice, Zonenspiele - Kleine Gruppen three times with short passes and Gegenpressing, Trainingsspiel 11 gegen 11 twice with position training, and HIIT twice with fitness. Bottom right reads Trainingsumfang: Profi, next to the rings Kondition 64 and Frische 97 — high fitness and high freshness two weeks into the season.

The same screen one tier down, built out as a semi-pro:

Seven drills, all spent on set pieces — Freistöße three times, Elfmeter four times — with tactic progress at 48/100 underneath. And at the bottom, the amateur week from the same author:

An amateur squad gets three slots in the entire week, and every day is headed Frei until you fill them — the greyed-out hours are the ones the players spend at work, and the author counts the pattern out: part-time, full-time, part-time, full-time. His prescription for that budget is blunt: fitness first and as hard as it goes. Do not pick Aktive Erholung, take the most strenuous conditioning unit available, and leave tactics and playing philosophy for later — his own summary is fitness, fitness and even more fitness. The reason is not ideology: he reports a side whose fitness ran down to roughly half during the season because the training budget went elsewhere, and in this league an unfit team loses the second half of every match.

What a drill trains: the card on hover

This is the information that costs the most time to find, because it is not printed next to the drill. Hover a card and a panel opens with six lines — in the shot for Angriff über die Mitte:

Verschiedene Fähigkeiten (various abilities) — a long strip running from Abschlag, Anbieten, Auffassen, Aufbauspiel, Ausdauer, Ballhalten, Ballsicherheit, Biss, Dribbling, Erobern, Fangsicherheit, Flanken, Freistöße, Kopfball, Kreativität, Kurzpass, Langpass, Manndeckung, Paraden, Reflexe, Robustheit, Schnelligkeit, Schusskraft, Schusstechnik, Stellungsspiel, Technik, Torgefährlichkeit, Übersicht and Volley through to Zweikampf — then Taktik (here Angriff über die Mitte), Spieler 30/30, Intensität 100 %, Frische -1, Verletzung 0 % and Spaß +0. Those last three lines are why the plan is a trade-off: every drill costs a little freshness, may carry injury risk, and lands on the mood meter.

And here is the trap the author warns about twice, in two different episodes: only Schnelles Umschaltspiel improves counter-attacking. The cards with “counter” in the name — Konter mit Passspiel, Konter mit weiten Bällen — train passing, speed and ball winning, not the tactic. If you want a counter-attacking team, you schedule the quick transition game, however misleading that feels.

The complete drill list

Select a drill in a week and the Löschen (remove) dialog opens — and the same dialog lists the entire catalogue, alphabetically in two columns, each row with its group size, the values it trains and a five-dot row:

From the screenshot, 45 drills in two alphabetical columns. Column one: Abseitsfalle, Aktive Erholung, Angriffe durch die Mitte, Angriffe mit direktem Passspiel, Angriffe über Außen, Ausdauerlauf, Auslaufen, Distanzschüsse, Dribbling, Ecken Rückraum, Ecken Strafraum, Ecken kurz, Einwürfe, Elfmeter, Flache Hereingaben, Flanken, Freistöße, Gegenpressing, Gymnastik/Stabilisation, HIIT, Individuelle Fähigkeiten, Konter mit Passspiel, Konter mit weiten Bällen. Column two: Kontrolliertes Umschaltspiel, Kopfbälle, Krafttraining, Positionsspiele Große Gruppen, Positionsspiele Kleine Gruppen, Pressing, Pässe, Rondó-Varianten, Schnelles Umschaltspiel, Schwalben, Sechsfelderschach, Spezielle Angriffe, Sprints, Steigerungsläufe, Technik, Torabschlüsse, Training-Parcours, Trainingsspiel 11 gegen 11, Zonenspiele Große Gruppen, Zonenspiele Kleine Gruppen, Zweikämpfe, Über- und Unterzahl.

Which of those you need is decided by your tactics, not by the calendar. The reading from episode #038, mapped drill by drill onto the playing philosophies:

Two more rules of thumb follow directly from the Spezielles tab at the bottom of the training screen. First: anything there with no slider is used automatically and therefore has to be trained — free kicks and the Ecken Strafraum corner routine are always taken, so they belong in the plan. Anything that does have a slider (Abseitsfalle, Dribbling, Schwalben, Pressing, Gegenpressing, Weite Pässe) you can set to zero and then skip in training; the short and back-post corner variants run at 20 % at most anyway. Second: Über- und Unterzahl plus Angriffe durch die Mitte and Angriffe über Außen belong in every plan, because every attacking situation is one of them. The Trainingsstand panel prints these as x/100 values — in the professional shot Überzahlspiel 37/100, Unterzahlspiel 34/100, Angriffe durch die Mitte 35/100, Angriffe über Außen 47/100, plus Kurz 49/100, Rückraum 42/100, Strafraum 34/100. What a week of tactical units adds to those bars — and why it pays to train the philosophy you actually play rather than switching it — is the tactics training guide’s subject. How those numbers behave once the whistle blows is worked out in the match engine tactics guide.

Intensity, repetition and the two constants

Intensity lives on the card itself, not in the drill menu: a triangle with two arrows that sets the workload as a percentage.

In the shot the Ecken Strafraum card carries two “Ecken” entries above a triangle sitting at the middle step; in other weeks from the same author, cards at 100 % and 150 % sit side by side. His rule of thumb: the middle ground is roughly 120–180 % effort. Conditioning lacking, dial up; squad tired, dial down. And because the drill Aktive Erholung does the opposite — it buys freshness instead of fitness — it is the wrong pick in a build-up week unless recovery is genuinely the goal. How fast players improve at all is decided by a line on the difficulty screen, Erfolgreiches Training, covered in our difficulty settings guide. How those gains then land on the player himself — progress towards the next level and the re-rating that follows — is the player development guide’s subject.

On repetition, the rule is what separates progress from a mutinous dressing room: never the same drill more than three times a week, and if you do use three, do not repeat it the following week — twice is the safe ceiling. The reason is printed on the card: too much of the same annoys the players, and annoyed players train worse. His two constants, which stay in every week, are Ausdauerlauf for the reserves and Auslaufen for everyone — so the players who did not feature carry the same load as the eleven who did and fitness does not leak away through the bench. In a professional week that leaves six slots for tactics.

Saving and naming weekly plans

The Woche speichern button at the top right opens the Trainingswoche speichern screen, with a name field on the right, a list of saved weeks and the actions Trainingswoche erstellen, Trainingswoche kopieren and Trainingswoche löschen; below them Verfügbare Wochen counts what you have.

Why naming is worth the typing: saved weeks belong to the manager, not to the save, so a fourteen-slot professional plan simply does not fit an amateur week with three. The author therefore prefixes each name with who built it and for which save, then the purpose and the tier, and finishes with a variant letter — week 1 semi-pro A, then week 2a and 2b in rotation. The letter is not decoration: if he promises the team a day off before a match, or a fixture lands in the middle of the plan, he needs the alternate version loaded. You pull a saved week back in through Fertige Wochen, and the Fertige Woche auswählen button shows what the game ships as templates — the fitness week in the professional screenshot above came from exactly there.

This week-by-week calendar is also what players arriving from WE ARE FOOTBALL 2024 search for as training weeks, and the term maps one-to-one onto this screen: every Trainingswoche you build, save, copy or delete is one training week, and the Verfügbare Wochen line at the bottom is simply the size of your stock. A small library — pre-season conditioning weeks, in-season tactic weeks, a recovery week — is what the create, copy and delete buttons are for, and the repetition ceiling from the section above is the reason that library wants at least two in-season variants instead of one fixed week. Where those weeks sit in the wider plan — training camp, sponsor days and squad checks before matchday one — the pre-season guide lines them up step by step.

Training groups: three different weeks inside one plan

The second tab of the training screen splits the load by group instead of by day. On the left sits Reguläres Training under the line “Diese Spieler trainieren die im Trainingsplan gesetzten Einheiten”, with a player table (HP, NPs, Name, Stä., Fo., Fähigkeiten, Alter, Char., Kon., Fri., Tal.); on the right, the groups, each running its own week type.

The groups in the shot: Trainingsgruppe 2 set to Aufbau with the note “Diese Spieler waren verletzt und müssen wieder an die Mannschaft herangeführt werden” (they were injured and have to be worked back into the squad), Trainingsgruppe 3 set to Kondition for players whose base is not there yet, and Trainingsgruppe 4 set to Regeneration, “Diese Spieler dürfen sich in dieser Trainingswoche erholen”. Below them: Trainingsgruppen auflösen, Co-Trainer macht Vorschlag and three checkboxes — Trainingsgruppen wöchentlich zurücksetzen, Co-Trainer managt Trainingsgruppen and Dabei Gruppeneinteilung beibehalten. Groups are filled by dragging players across, and the headcount sits in the NPs column.

That is also where the hub warning Keine Trainingsgruppen points, when the club hub reads “Sie nutzen die Möglichkeit nicht, durch die Aufteilung auf Trainingsgruppen die Ergebnisse des Trainings zu optimieren” — the route to that panel is in the controls and menus guide. Handing the whole split to the co-trainer means relying on his competence stars, diligence and department workload, which the staff and HR guide explains. And the four buttons at the bottom right are what tie the plan back to matches: Woche speichern, Fertige Woche auswählen, Saisonplanung and Angriffe einstudieren. If the bars still refuse to move, the cause is usually freshness in the wrong week — the rotation logic in the medical and injuries guide — or an intensity spiral the beginner guide places into the pre-season calendar.

Three matches a week: how do players keep the squad fit?

The plan’s own levers are only half the battle once league, cup and Europe stack three matches into a week — the other half is a squad big enough to absorb them, and that is the part the community has started comparing notes on. A thread titled “Large squad for 3 mathches per week” (sic), opened by Al on 7 October 2026, puts the feeling in one line: “Three matches a week + 32 players = a psychological nightmare.” At that rhythm he reports having “no choice but to maintain three squads”, and because playing time is expressed as a percentage — the Soll/Ist promises the squad screens guide documents — the expectations multiply faster than the minutes: “only 5 satisfied players out of a squad of 32 because of playing-time expectations.” His aside on the premise itself: “in real life English top clubs dont play 3 matches in one week. Its too much.”

By 11 October 2026 the thread stood at six replies, and the counter-model is now on the record: Telrak champions the small-squad extreme — “Why would you ever have more players than the size of your bench?!? I never played with more than 18 players since original WAF.” — injuries even out over time, second-squad players can plug the gaps, and the approach “saves a lot of money in salaries”; he even suspects the game injures more players the bigger the squad gets, while flagging it himself as a feeling rather than a measurement: “Not sure, if the number of injuries scales with squad size but I somehow got the feeling that you get more players injured the more players you got.” Al’s rebuttal is not about money but friction: the reserves are “much weaker”, and every promotion from them has to be scheduled by hand — “Every time I move someone from the reserves to the main squad—or vice versa—I have to schedule it, as if I’m helping the player pack his gear and hauling it over to the team’s base.” “It is incredibly inconvenient!” Whichever size you favour, the two posts agree on the underlying point: at three matches a week, no squad size in the current game comes without its own tax.

A day later the German thread “Fitness bei Dreifachbelastung” (EXB, 8 October 2026) asked the same question from the fitness side — “egal was ich versuche, die Fitness meiner Spieler sinkt ständig weiter … Weder Regeneration noch Trainingsfrei scheinen zu helfen” (no matter what I try, my players’ fitness keeps sinking … neither Regeneration nor a break from training seems to help) — and the reply from Labac1975 is the closest thing the forums currently offer to a recipe. Its ingredients: 30 players are “viel zu viele” — far too many; instead 20 players of similar strength (Stärke 10.5–11.5) plus 5–6 who rotate between bench and stand (8.5–10), because “Rotation ist hier Pflicht” — rotation is mandatory here; good staff members matter too. Two training groups are fixed — Kondition and Frische — and the thresholds he plays by are quoted here as what they are, one player’s rule of thumb rather than a game formula: “alle unter 70 => Konditionstraining (spielen dann dafür nicht!!! in der Woche), alle unter 70 Frische => Regeneration.”

The thread has kept growing — sixteen replies by 11 October 2026 — and its most detailed answer, from MasterJB, amounts to two ready-made week templates plus a discipline. The discipline concerns red units: «Lasse in einer englischen Woche auf gar keinen Fall mehr als eine rote Trainingseinheit auf gelber oder roter Intensität laufen» — in an English week, never run more than one red unit at yellow or red intensity — «damit ballerst du zwar Kondition, aber die Frische leidet massiv» — you do pump up conditioning that way, but freshness suffers massively. His normal-week template: two red units right at the start of the week to build conditioning gently, skill drills such as sprints and progression runs on green intensity, a 50/50 split of yellow and orange units at yellow intensity, active recovery on Sunday. His English-week template: one red unit at the start on green intensity, then active recovery before both matches and after the second one, to keep freshness in check. And his group fine-tuning puts a second set of thresholds next to Labac1975’s: «Kondition unter 70 Konditionsgruppe auf gelber Intensität (rot zerstört Frische), Frische unter 75 Regenerationsgruppe auf grüner Intensität» — conditioning below 70 goes into the conditioning group at yellow intensity (red destroys freshness), freshness below 75 into the regeneration group at green intensity. Neither set of numbers is official — two players’ rules of thumb that agree on the conditioning figure and part ways on the freshness one. MasterJB’s second post adds a lever nobody else in the thread names: the Einsatz (effort) setting. «Wie im direkten Hinweis Text haben höherer Einsatz deutlichen Einfluss auf die Anzahl der Karten und die Frische» — as the in-game tooltip itself says, higher effort clearly affects how many cards the team collects and how freshness drains — so «Es ist schlicht nicht möglich (zurecht finde ich), permanent mit hohem Einsatz zu spielen» — it is simply not possible (rightly so, he finds) to play at high effort permanently; his advice: drop the effort automatically at a three-goal lead, try half an hour of low-effort bus parking, or accept a hiding against a top side instead of overextending — «Das rächt sich dann später in der Saison, wenn man es übertreibt» (that takes its revenge later in the season if you overdo it).

The same thread documents an automation gap that several players report from different angles: the checkbox Co-Trainer managt Trainingsgruppen seems not to do anything for them. EXB: the option “scheint ja nicht zu funktionieren/wirken” (seems not to function or take effect); Brixen has it “eingestellt, dass der Co-Trainer sich drum kümmern soll, aber wie es aussieht, passiert da nix” (set the co-trainer to look after it, but apparently nothing happens); nelsonmonths never sees a single player land in the groups. A fourth voice describes it working — pick what each of the three groups should do on the right of the screen and “der Co-Trainer teilt dann die Gruppen ein” (the co-trainer then divides up the groups) — and EXB’s own follow-up lands between the camps: the co-trainer does assemble groups on his save, “aber nicht immer, sprich nicht jede Woche, und was er da zusammenstellt ist auch nicht immer logisch” (not always — not every week — and what he assembles is not always logical). MasterJB’s verdict on the whole complex is the bluntest: even at high staff levels the co-trainer’s group assignment is «absolut beschissen» (absolute rubbish), and no manual rules exist for pinning a specific player to a specific group — an omission he calls a missing quality-of-life update. Until the game speaks for itself in a patch note, all of this stays where the quotes put it: player reports.

In the English thread, chaddid describes the same shape at a different squad size — 24–25 players, a stamina trait on the workhorses, a dedicated Regeneration group — plus one shrug at the balance dial: “I think there should be some tweaking to the fatigue.” None of this is official: no manual line, no tooltip, every quote one player’s save. What is mechanical is the calendar the three fixtures arrive in — the weekly schedule guide shows where matches sit inside the week — and the screens above are where the rotation gets paid for.