International football schedule has simply become a bad joke
Governing bodies need to start listening to the players who have to play all of these matches all year round
The Premier League has a credibility issue on Saturday. For a long time I have considered international breaks as an inconvenience. This weekend, it is an unacceptable intrusion.
Eight Brazil players and three Argentina players will be among a large South American contingent representing their countries in the early hours of tomorrow morning.
The following day, Liverpool are resigned to being without goalkeeper Alisson and midfielder Fabinho at Watford. Manchester City are likely to face Burnley without Ederson and Gabriel Jesus. Chelsea are expected to miss Thiago Silva, Manchester United Fred, and Leeds United Raphinha.
Aston Villa No1 Emiliano Martinez is a doubt for his side’s game with Wolves, and although Tottenham’s Emerson Royal (Brazil), Giovani Lo Celso and Cristian Romero (both Argentina) have longer to recover because their club play on Sunday, a 12-hour plane journey is no preparation for a top-flight fixture.
Although all the title-contending clubs are affected to some extent, the integrity of the match day has been undermined due to avoidable, external circumstances. It is inexcusable that Fifa has allowed World Cup qualifiers to be scheduled at such a time, which means the clubs who pay the players’ salaries – in some cases around £250,000 a week – cannot reasonably play them.
There should have been compromises to stop this. Brazil’s and Argentina’s first games of this break were last Friday. Even accounting for the disruption caused by the pandemic, they should have been able to reschedule three games in two weeks without impeding their clubs.
The threat of a suspension if these players do not accept an international call-up means the clubs have been bullied into losing their own employees, with Fifa able to flex its muscle in order to enhance and promote its own tournaments, regardless of how much it impacts and undermines the domestic game in a host of countries. At a time when the governing body is lobbying for support for its reforms, it is no wonder so many players and managers are unhappy.
Not so long ago I received a call from Fifa’s chief of global development, Arsene Wenger, as he continued his mission to gather support for a biennial World Cup. Naturally, Wenger is someone I hold in the highest regard, who has many good ideas on how the game should evolve and genuinely wants the best solution to prevent the stop-start introduction to domestic seasons.
With regards to the need for a radical change to the international calendar, Wenger was preaching to a converted audience.
The European qualification rounds for major summer tournaments are of low quality, and are often a boring interruption to the domestic campaign, rarely pitting the best versus the best. Some of the qualifiers look more like pre-season friendlies, where a manager can make 10 changes and still win easily.
We see too many games where poor teams with 11 men behind the ball persist with trying to keep the score down when they are two or three goals behind.
Three international breaks before Christmas is too much. It should be reduced to one longer mid-season break, with domestic campaigns ending earlier to enable a series of qualifying rounds in May or June. That would help national coaches to build momentum with back-to-back games.
Where Wenger lost me, however, was in suggesting there should be more World Cups.
The reforms of Fifa and Uefa have added to rather than solved the problem of fixture congestion.
To be fair, the Uefa Nations League has produced a higher standard of international football, but when replacing meaningless friendlies with competitive internationals, the end result is still too many games, increasing the chances of top players getting burnt out or injured. And it still does not disguise the reality that club football is vastly superior, and far more satisfying for the game’s connoisseurs.
My suspicion is the idea of a biennial World Cup is rooted in Fifa’s envy of the greatest football competition, the Uefa Champions League. That is where the highest quality football is played, especially from the quarter-finals onwards. Tactically and technically, the best players and managers measure themselves against success in that competition every season.
For Fifa, a biennial World Cup would absorb more of the wealth and attention to its flagship event, increasing revenue from sponsors and broadcasters. Naturally, there will be support from those regions where there is a shortage of elite football, increasing their opportunities to be host nations. It is interesting to note that the biennial World Cup idea was first proposed by the Saudi Arabian Football Federation.
I was on a Zoom conference call with Wenger, with a few other ex-players, to discuss the idea. One of his arguments was that there need to be more chances for players from countries which lack the infrastructure and opportunities provided in the more developed footballing nations.
“If you were born with the same talent but you were born in Yaounde, London or Hanoi you have not the same chance to become a great football player,” he said in his recent interview in The Daily Telegraph.
While they are noble sentiments, it does not follow that nations will inevitably improve simply by being thrust into a higher level. Andorra and San Marino’s decades of poor results tell us that.
My advice is to listen to the current players who are being forced to play all these games. The views of Belgium goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois should carry some weight. “We’re not robots,” Courtois said last week. “If we never say anything it will always be the same. They just care about their pockets.”
These sentiments were especially well timed given they were made after a third/fourth place play-off game after the Nations League semi-finals.
Those games are among the most absurd, unnecessary fixtures, never wanted by the players involved, nor remembered by anyone watching.
In their push for a biennial World Cup, voices such as those of Courtois will be as much an inconvenience for Fifa as they are to Uefa. But the most credible opinions are those of the contemporary, elite coaches and players who must deal with the constant physical and mental pressure of travelling around the world and delivering at the highest level all year round.
Until all the governing bodies start listening to them, there is no prospect of a reasonable fix for an unreasonable and increasingly unsustainable football calendar.