We are flogging players when we need to put their health first - something has to give
Everyone is jostling for a place in a very busy international calendar and the concern is the welfare of the players is becoming secondary, or even further down the list, as we try to accommodate all these matches.
If you have got tired players playing in elite competition, we are at risk of short-changing those who pay to watch the game. You do not run racehorses every two or three days. We are flogging players when we need to start putting their needs and their health first.
At FifPro, the world players’ union, we launched our “At The Limit” report a few months ago in which we make a number of recommendations about the need for a more holistic approach to the international calendar, given the strains being put on players.
When players are playing more concentrated schedules, it affects injuries and results as well. When players are playing with shortened rest periods, they are more prone to injuries and, in terms of performances, there is a correlation that results tend to be lower in those circumstances.
We spoke to players as part of our research and asked them what they thought an optimum level of games should be and one of the best examples cited was Eden Hazard. He suggested perhaps 50 games in a season would be an upper limit for players and yet, from May 2018 to June 2019, Hazard played 73 games.
The one that probably stood out among all of the players was Son Heung-min at Tottenham Hotspur. Not only did he play more games than anybody else – 78 matches in that period, which is practically a game every four days – he was also travelling huge distances. He travelled 70,000 miles to represent his country, South Korea.
I sit on the Fifa stakeholders’ committee and the Uefa professional strategy council and the issue of players’ workload is something we have been raising consistently in all the discussions.
I agree with this generation of managers, people such as Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola, who have registered their concerns, but I used to have these conversations going back years with Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, so it is not a new phenomenon.
If anything, it has been exacerbated and got worse because of the expansion of some of the competitions. We need to come together – all of the game’s stakeholders – and have a sensible discussion around the whole football calendar because the burden on some of the top players is incredible.
Something has to give, and it cannot be the health of the players.
