Fixture list and calendar congestion has become a thing this summer as domestic clubs and unions rally against FIFA’s ever growing international expansion, and with the English Premier League heavily involved in those discussions and criticisms, Chief Executive Officer Richard Masters has now gone on record with his own thoughts.
In a recent interview with the BBC, the PL’s head honcho claimed that football would soon reach a saturation point unless the authorities quickly acknowledged the strains on players, and began to mitigate the workload that is placed on them in the game.
FIFA have naturally denied these accusations, and insist that domestic leagues and unions have been fully consulted over calendar plans and changes – particularly the pivot to the 32 team Club World Cup – but Masters has doubled down and insisted that too much football, too packed a fixture list, and not enough breaks for the players is harmful to them, and ultimately will just turn fans off.
He has a point obviously, but we have been talking about football saturation for well over a decade and most clubs in general are now playing fewer competitive games than ever. Yet others are insistent on long foreign tours, with many using reasonable break periods during a domestic campaign to jet off again for sunnier climes under the guise of training camps, yet high profile and lucrative friendlies have begun to curiously appear.
The Premier League encourages this, it actually defends such moves as it grows their own world wide profile and encourages greater broadcasting rights, and a very good argument could be made for their continuing to lobby the Football Association to further denigrate the overall domestic pyramid calendar in favour of a minimal number (four, let us be honest in reality) of clubs.
With certain managers constantly banging on about game time, whilst not using their full squads, rotating, using substitutes appropriately and encouraging unnecessary tours, the PL will not look closer to home – because that would mean admonishing the very clubs they actually go to pains to protect, even if it demeans the remainder of the domestic pyramid.
The growing FIFA calendar is an issue, that should not be denied, but the likes of the PL should not hide behind ‘player welfare’ when their own protected member clubs do not concern themselves with that issue, and more importantly the facts show (on a non international front) teams are playing fewer games than ever.
Football is already saturated, it has been for years, fans have been pointing it out given the ridiculous increases in ticket prices, but to throw the toys out of the pram on a named competition that effects a handful of clubs, seems incredibly trite, as it still misses the real issues that fans actually have.