A little over 20 years ago, one of the world’s top players admitted that he was burned out from too much football. “I’m not just tired, I’m cooked,” said Patrick Vieira after playing 66 matches the previous season. “I can hardly stand up at times. My back hurts, my legs hurt, I hurt everywhere.” And then something quite bizarre happened: Fifa and Uefa actually listened.
In fact, a fortnight later, Fifa’s medical chief, Jiri Dvorak, even suggested there should be a limit to how many times anyone should play across a season given the amount of non-contact injuries. “There are rules about the maximum number of hours per day you can drive a truck, but there are no rules for footballers,” he told the Observer. “Guidelines on the number of games in a season would benefit them by keeping them as healthy as possible.”
And Uefa? Well, that same year it decided to scrap the Champions League second group stage after its medical experts linked the high number of injuries before and during the 2002 World Cup – including to Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham and Robert Pires – to players being worn out.
But that was then. Now, matches are already much longer due to the extra minutes played in added time. And over the next 31 months, the game will go even more Super Size Me, with an expanded Champions League, 32-team Club World Cup and then 48-team World Cup – a treadmill of games with little pause for top players until July 2026.
And the greatest irony? Fifa and Uefa, the governing bodies supposed to protect them, are the ones gleefully pressing down the buttons making them go even faster.
It means that Phil Foden, who has already played 36 games this season – more than any English footballer in the Premier League – could end up playing over 200 games in the next 31 months. How? Well, if Manchester City go deep in the FA Cup and Champions League, and England reach the semi-finals of Euro 2024, Foden faces another 40 games this season.
The Professional Footballers’ Association reckons that next season the leading players could play up to 86 games because of an expanded 32-team Fifa Club World Cup, which finishes on 13 July 2025.
And there will be barely any time to recover before the 2025-26 Premier League season, followed by the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.
You don’t need a PhD in sports science to predict what will happen. Too much football leads to fatigued players. Fatigue leads to a greater chance of poorer-quality matches and more injuries. And we, as spectators, are paying for a worse product. We saw it in some of this weekend’s FA Cup matches. Players were tired. Can you blame them?
Some readers will argue that a few extra games a year is a small price to pay for salaries in excess of £250,000 a week. Fifa also denies that an expanded fixture calendar risks player welfare, with its chief of football development, Arsène Wenger, recently claiming that medical technology, nutrition and injury prevention had all improved dramatically in the past 20 years. However, at some point this becomes not just a question of physiology but philosophy. How many games a season is too much? 100? 120?
The game also has to be careful to protect its biggest stars. Last year a report by the international players union, Fifpro, found that Jude Bellingham had played more than 30% more minutes of competitive football by his 20th birthday than Wayne Rooney at the same age. By the time Kylian Mbappé turned 24 he had played 26,952 minutes – 48% more minutes than Thierry Henry at the same age.
Certainly the players don’t appear to agree with Wenger. The Manchester United defender Raphaël Varane has talked of “dangerous” workload demands, while Bernardo Silva warned that playing so many games would lead to a loss of energy and intensity.
The PFA tells me that this is the topic that resonates most around dressing rooms. Understandably most players prefer not to talk about it, however, because they appreciate they have a privileged job and make a lot of money.
However it was telling that the PFA chief executive, Maheta Molango, warned that people were ready to take legal action because they don’t feel protected. One avenue being explored is the recent European court of justice ruling over the European Super League, which appeared to suggest the powers and authority of Fifa and Uefa should be limited.
More players should be publicly pushing back against expanded seasons. They should be calling for a guaranteed four-week break between seasons. And they should urge Fifa and Uefa to speak to experts to determine how many games is too much.
Meanwhile if today’s players need any incentive to be bolder, they could look to the past. Sixty-three years ago this month, 344 players gathered at the Grand Hotel in Manchester to discuss industrial action over the maximum wage of £20 a week. “Is there many in this room not prepared to strike on Saturday week?” asked the Blackburn winger – and later Scotland manager – Ally McLeod. “No!” came the cries back, which were so powerful that Jimmy Hill said that they could have “come from the Kop at its loudest”.
Two days later the maximum wage was scrapped – and the strike called off. Perhaps there is a lesson there, relevant today: player power works.
