Can footballers ever be too muscular?
March 9, 2026
There is one topic in football that’s guaranteed to elicit strong opinions from players and coaches alike: muscle. Specifically, how much of it should you be carrying?
Last week, West Ham United head coach Nuno Espirito Santo lit a fire under the issue when he told reporters he had banned their winger Adama Traore from lifting weights.
“It’s incredible (his muscles), it’s genetics,” Nuno told a press conference. “I’ve told him to stay out of the gym. It’s one of the things he needs to realise. It’s enough weight that he carries. He’ll do prevention work (in the gym), but he’s not in there lifting weights.”
He went on to explain how, for some players, particularly younger ones such as Airidas Golambeckis (an 18-year-old defender in the under-21s squad at West Ham), gaining muscle mass can be critical. ”We have to get weight on him! He’s the one who needs some muscle,” said Nuno.
Muscle mass is clearly important for developing the physical qualities footballers rely on: acceleration, strength in duels and repeated sprint ability. But is there a limit to how much is necessary or even useful? If so, how much is enough? And what does “too much” actually mean?
Traore’s muscular frame has always been the defining feature of his playing career, accentuated by his habit of applying baby oil to his arms before matches to make it harder for opposition defenders to hold him back.
Yet the 30-year-old Spain international is far from alone.
Romelu Lukaku, the Belgium international striker, spoke about having to lose some of the muscle mass he had gained for the 2018 World Cup finals when he returned to his then club Manchester United.
“In the Premier League, I cannot play with the same amount of muscle as international football,” he told reporters at the time. “When I came back, I knew straight away, ‘Nah, I cannot play in this style like this’. I had to lose muscle, basically. So you just stay out of the gym, drink a lot of water, and eat a lot of veg and fish, and it helps.”
While Lukaku has a big build, smaller players have found themselves needing to add muscle to cope with the Premier League’s physicality.
It is probably not a coincidence that Florian Wirtz has looked more at home at Liverpool, following last summer’s transfer from Bayer Leverkusen of Germany, since adding some extra weight; further back, then Everton striker Dominic Calvert-Lewin — whose natural frame is quite gangly — spent time during the Covid-19 lockdown period packing on muscle.
Romelu Lukaku has always had a big frame. Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images
“There is probably a ‘Goldilocks’ zone, a sweet spot, in terms of what your body composition is, or should be as a football player,” says Tristan Baker, head of performance at Go Perform.
The players we see performing in football’s top leagues all tend to be very lean, athletic, but with a good amount of muscle mass.
“Those body types and shapes are what can perform best in the demands of the modern game,” Baker adds. “They need to be able to sprint, twist, turn and effectively run continuously for 90 minutes. They cover 10 kilometres (over six miles), sometimes even more, in a 90-minute game. And that’s at intermittent speeds.”
Baker looks at how a player moves to help establish whether they are in that ‘Goldilocks’ zone.
“I pay attention to the lower-leg complex — the foot, the ankle — that should act as a tightly-coiled spring. They should be quite reactive off the floor. If someone’s quite heavy, it ends up compressing that, so their heel will drop rather than be in an elevated position as they sprint or change direction.
“The analogy I always use is you want to be more like a race-car suspension than a slinky — two springs at the opposite end of the spectrum.”
The ability to create stiffness through the foot and ankle and be reactive off the floor is key. If a player adds muscle or fat mass, increasing their body weight, but doesn’t have the stiffness to go along with that, says Baker, it can push them more towards the slinky end of the spectrum — ie, a spring “that compresses quite easily. They’re not able to change direction, turn, jump or sprint as effectively as they might do with a stiffer lower leg”.
Finding that line between having enough muscle to be effective on the pitch and having “too much” of it is tricky, and rarely where people assume it is, says high-performance coach and co-founder of Myolab, Daniel Booth.
He says that the long-held belief in football that adding muscle automatically makes players slower stems from a misunderstanding about what drives sprinting and acceleration. “The key variable is not muscle mass itself,” Booth explains. “It’s force production relative to body mass, and how quickly that force can be expressed.”
Problems only arise when body mass increases without a corresponding increase in force production. If a rise in mass comes with improvements in those qualities, then the muscle becomes functional or useful, rather than restrictive.
“So, the ‘line’ is not defined by how muscular a player looks,” says Booth. “It’s determined by whether their strength and power qualities improve in proportion to their body mass.”
Florian Wirtz has added muscle mass since arriving at Liverpool last summer. Liverpool FC via Getty Images
Strength development and muscle gain are obviously closely related — lifting heavier weights in the gym to focus on the former can result in the latter as a by-product. But there are ways to mitigate this, says strength and conditioning coach Sam Pepys, who has worked with Luton Town and Crystal Palace.
“Building strength is about higher intensity — lifting higher percentages (of your one-rep maximum) or higher numbers from a perceived exertion perspective. Then, having much longer rest periods so that the muscle has time to recover between working sets.”
For muscle building, or hypertrophy training, Pepys says the volume (the number of repetitions or sets) would be higher, to place more metabolic stress on the muscle, and rest periods would be shorter.
There isn’t a universal number where muscle suddenly turns from useful to useless, or even detrimental, in football.
In 2021, the European game’s governing body UEFA released a consensus statement on nutrition at elite levels of the sport and concluded that “there is no single value for either body mass or fat mass against which targets or judgements should be made”.
In practice, says Booth, the line appears “when performance outputs stop improving or start to decline”.
In football, those performance outputs usually include five-metre and 10-metre acceleration, maximum sprint velocity, countermovement jump power, reactive strength index (explosive power, calculated as the ratio of jump height to ground contact time, typically during a drop jump), repeat sprint ability and high-speed running metrics during matches.
If a player gains muscle mass but those outputs improve or stay the same, that additional beef is clearly contributing to performance, says Booth. Whereas, if body mass increases but acceleration slows or power outputs drop, that’s usually the point where the athlete’s force-to-mass ratio has declined.
It’s also important to talk about where muscle is gained. While anyone who has ever tried to shed a few pounds knows you cannot choose which part of the body fat is lost from, you can control where muscle gets added.
Elite performance coach Neil Parsley has worked with British Cycling, where reducing muscle mass in the upper bodies of endurance athletes was a focus. “I’ll never forget the shoulders of the cyclists,” he recalls. “There was nothing of them.”
Muscle mass in the legs was the most useful for cyclists, similar to footballers. Although footballers do clearly need strength higher on their bodies, too. “They’ve got to be strong for the duels, but they can’t carry additional mass,” says Parsley, who describes the general build of a footballer now as “very strong, muscular legs and a very strong core” but relatively lean up top.
In 2013, cyclists Njisane Nicholas Phillip, Robert Forstemann and Shane Perkins had leg muscles *slightly* bigger than the average footballer. Andrew Yates/AFP via Getty Images
The reason that additional mass is not helpful is down to two factors, says Parsley: the additional stress of carrying that extra weight in the top divisions, where the amount of high-speed running is ever-increasing; and the difficulty of keeping muscle on during a 10-month season.
“The average body weight of players increases as you go down the divisions,” says Parsley, who, in part, puts that down to the difference in intensities. While there is only a small difference in the total volume of running between the Premier League and the lower tiers of the game, Parsley says the amount of high-intensity running (>19.8km/h) and sprint distance increases with each rung you move up the league ladder.
“It’s the opposite to bodyweight — as you go up the divisions, the high-intensity running and sprint distance goes up, but bodyweight goes down,” he says.
“When you’re running 10 to 11km a match and you’re doing 1,000m of high-speed running, that strips muscle off you. As a performance team, we’re trying to stop that degradation of muscle. But it’s so hard during the season, with the amount of high-intensity training and games. That’s why, as soon as they come in after training, they eat, they supplement, then they take more supplements before they go to bed. Protein helps recovery, but it also helps them to keep hold of the muscle mass they’ve got.”
Certain playing positions would warrant a slightly more physical stature in the upper body, says Pepys, naming centre-halves and goalkeepers as two of those. But for most, he adds, “having additional muscles in your biceps is not that relevant for football”.
That additional weight can increase impact and stress on the joints, and can also come with other costs, he says. “It can cause oxygen uptake to increase, beats per minute (heart rate) to increase — we’re talking fractional increases, but when we’re looking at it in the grand scheme of things, it’s still impact.”
Traore’s build is rare in football, for all the reasons outlined above. That doesn’t make it “wrong” or unhelpful, though, says performance nutritionist Dr Nessan Costello, who describes body composition in elite sport as an output — the result of training load, diet and genetics. But so often, he says, it is treated like an input; something practitioners try to manipulate directly.
“In elite footballers, two of those factors (driving body composition) are largely fixed,” says Costello, pointing to the training load required to compete at the highest level (which is non-negotiable), and genetics, which strongly influence individual body type and muscle mass. “In many cases, these are the very traits that helped that athlete reach elite sport in the first place.”
Those two factors are also the most powerful drivers of body composition, says Costello.
“This is why attempts to significantly reduce muscle mass in a player who trains hard and is genetically predisposed to being muscular are often misguided. Achieving that typically requires a large energy deficit and/or sub-optimal protein intake, encouraging the body to break down its own muscle tissue to meet energy demands.
“From a performance perspective, that approach makes little sense.”
Adama Traore has been told to stay away from the gym by his West Ham head coach Nuno Espirito Santo. Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Although body composition matters to performance, Costello believes that priorities should be more performance-focused: “If an elite footballer trains appropriately and eats well, their body will usually settle into a composition that supports their health and performance. Trying to impose an externally defined physique on top of that can be not only misguided, but potentially harmful.”
The ideal amount of muscle mass for a player will vary based on several factors, including genetics and their on-pitch role. Deciphering that does not come down to aesthetics, says Booth, and whether a player “looks too muscular”.
“It’s whether the mass they carry is functional,” he adds, “contributing to force production, speed and resilience — or simply adding weight without improving performance.”
So, adding or removing muscle is rarely the end goal. Instead, Booth says, it’s about developing the physical qualities that best support the demands of that player’s position and body structure: “The ideal amount of muscle mass isn’t universal — it’s position-specific and athlete-specific.”
In talking specifically about Traore, Baker returns to his slinky/race car analogy, terming the Spanish winger an “outlier, because of his size, but he’s also extremely fast.
“So he’s not that person who’s soft and spongy through the Achilles and the ankle. He doesn’t look like a slinky. He’s more like that stiff-spring-like athlete.
“That’s the nice thing about elite sport. It throws up these people that are exceptions to a general rule.”
By Sarah Shephard, Staff Writer