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Football gym work is not bodybuilding. Sessions are shorter, more explosive and built around transferring strength to the pitch, and the music that supports them behaves differently.
Heavy and slow beats fast and busy
Under load, the useful quality in a track is space. A beat with room between hits gives you something to time a rep against; a dense arrangement just becomes noise.
This is why funk phonk, drill and slowed dembow edits are so common in footballers' gym clips. They hit hard without crowding the frame.
Rest periods matter
The songs between sets do as much work as the ones during them. Something with a groove and a lower ceiling keeps your heart rate settling without dropping the session's energy entirely.
A useful trick is to alternate: one heavy track, one mid-tempo, repeating. The list then breathes at roughly the rhythm of set and rest.
Building the list
Forty tracks is plenty. Order them so the first ten cover the warm-up, the middle twenty carry the main lifts, and the last ten handle accessory work and cooldown.
Then leave it alone for a month. Constantly reshuffling a gym playlist turns the session into a browsing exercise, which is the opposite of what it is for.
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