Festive workload puts players at the risk of breakdown

Christmas football is a sacred tradition but the quest to satisfy TV paymasters creates a schedule that is spiralling out of control

There were plenty of lousy ways to spend Christmas and new year – and playing or watching football was not one of them. The Liverpool firefighters who spent New Year’s Eve trying to stop a whole multi-storey car park going up in flames would rather have been at Anfield or Goodison Park.

But still, the Premier League’s schedule from Dec 23 to Jan 4 is crackers, unnecessarily relentless and “disastrous” physically for the players, Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola argued at Crystal Palace on Sunday. You would not find a single coach who feels anything other than despair and anger at having to play four games in 10 days, as many have, however much they love the big television money, and the severance packages it provides.

Christmas and new-year football – a glorious thing, when kept in bounds – has become its own Radio Times, packing a holiday period it never gets around to having itself, instead obliging club employees, stewards and the playing and coaching staff to snatch the odd day at home when they can. To be clear, Premier League fixtures were scheduled for Dec 23, 26, 27, 28, 30 and 31 – and then on Jan 1, 2, 3 and 4. This is not Christmas football. This is Christmas annexation, a new-year invasion, and should not be confused with the sacred need to stage games at this time of year.

Football is the best-known antidote to midwinter boredom and ennui: that sense of aimlessness that vies with gratitude for the chance to spend time with family and friends.

If, say, we could all go to games on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, most of us would feel sated, and the players would have their workload halved.

But our culture is not set up that way. First, there is no off-switch, which football has exploited with staggered kick-off times and by ramming the period between Boxing Day and Jan 1 with fixtures. Football is the new box set, directed at the smartphone and the smart TV, with the aim of making every day feel the same.

Second, television itself is in trouble, in the sense that viewing figures for programmes shown in “real time” are declining, as The Royle Family norm of people