THERE may have been a time in the distant past when people might not have been able to conceive of the idea of too much football.
Not anymore, with this summer’s Club World Cup about as necessary and welcome as a round of sandwiches within a couple of hours of Christmas dinner. Please, no más.
Top players like Aurelien Tchouameni are being put under more strain than ever at club and international level[/caption]
FIFA president Gianni Infantino will oversee the first 48-team World Cup in USA, Canada and Mexico next year[/caption]
We have reached saturation point, where few have any appetite for consuming another competition, particularly one designed by Fifa, DAZN and Saudi Arabia — a modern-day football axis of gluttony.
It is true that, before the League of Ireland changed to a calendar season, the summers used to drag, particularly when there was no international tournament on.
But, although we may not have appreciated it at the time, it turned out that absence made the heart grow fonder.
The boredom of the off-season morphed into anticipation like a caterpillar into a butterfly.
It was the natural order, the way things should be.
Transfer speculation and the release of fixtures helped to ensure that you never totally lost interest.
Pre-season friendlies, particularly against foreign opposition, in the summer had an allure.
They simply do not have the same appeal when it is a case of short days rather than short sleeves.
They take place in the depths of winter when the thought of going out to watch some fitness-building, non-competitive action when there are matches every night of the week on TV appeals to only a few sadists.
Maybe that will change if and when what is effectively a calendar season is rolled out across all levels of football in Ireland but I suspect not, given we will still be at odds with our nearest neighbour.
But those at the elite end of the game could be forgiven for thinking that the notion of a football calendar has been well and truly consigned to the dustbin.
Instead, it has been replaced by a hamster wheel into which players are invited to run themselves into the ground with no apparent recognition or concern that both they and their ability to perform are seriously compromised as a result.
The English Premier League season will end on May 25, the same day as La Liga in Spain and Italy’s Serie A.
Ligue Un in France will conclude three days earlier, the Bundesliga finishes up the previous weekend.
The Champions League final — which will be contested by two teams from those four leagues — will take place on May 31.
Time for a well-earned rest then? Not quite because many of the same players will be back in action, again in Germany but, in the meantime, some will have flown home with their clubs before returning with their countries.
Football laughs in the face of the carbon footprint.
On June 4, Germany and Portugal take on each other in the first of the Nations League semi-finals with the other, between Spain and France, taking place the following day with the third-place play-off and the final both slated for June 8.
The Nations League may be a better alternative to friendly games but expecting a product befitting of contests between those countries so soon after the European club season has concluded is fanciful.
IRISH ANGLE
And it is not just those at the elite level who will be kept busy either as other countries will be involved in either World Cup qualifiers or friendly games, such as Ireland, who play host to Senegal on June 6 and then travel to play Luxembourg four days later.
The absence of competitive fixtures at that time of year is no bad thing for Heimir Hallgrimsson considering our continued reliance on players from the English Championship. Its regular season ends on May 3.
Awkward timing is something Stephen Bradley had to contend with when Shamrock Rovers’ progress in the Conference League saw them playing games after the end of the 2024 League of Ireland season and before the beginning of the 2025 campaign.
A shortened close-season was, he accepted, the price of success, with the aim of faring better in Europe one of the original reasons put forward for the switch in the domestic season more than two decades ago.
But the notion of an off-season is becoming increasingly outdated because, within four days of those internationals, the Club World Cup kicks off in the USA.
PSG’s Willian Pacho has already played 49 games this season for club and country.
So has a Real Madrid counterpart but there is no sense football administrators know the one that is one ‘Tchouameni’.
Ecuador have two World Cup qualifiers in June and, depending on how they fare in cup competitions, PSG could have a further 21 fixtures between the league, French Cup, Champions League and the Club World Cup.
The Club World Cup final takes place on July 13.
Pacho finished up last season on July 5 when Ecuador were beaten on penalties by Argentina in the Copa America quarter-finals.
He was back in action in France on August 16 for PSG’s league opener against Le Havre.
FIFPRO CONCERNS
No wonder when the new global 32-team competition was announced in 2022, FIFPRO, the players’ union, said: “Once again, decisions to scale competitions without implementing appropriate safeguards are short-sighted and pay no attention to players’ health and performance.
“This decision once more shows that key stakeholders of the game are not being appropriately involved in decision making of football, even when it concerns the core of their fundamental rights.”
When issues such as player welfare come up, there are tiresome retorts about how much money they earn blah, blah, blah.
As the statement said, the issue is not simply one of their workload but their ability to perform to expectations.
Yes, in the past successful teams played a lot of games between cup replays and so on but there was nowhere near the same amount of travel involved.
And the ongoing creation of new tournaments or expansion of existing ones does not seem to be even in response to a greater demand from fans.
Why, then, has it come about? A broadcast rights deal worth $1billion to Fifa goes a long way to answering that question.
Is that how much they are really worth for a competition much of which is not ideally timed for the European TV audience and will have, I think, limited appeal?
It seems unlikely particularly as younger generations appear to prefer consuming football in bite-sized clips rather than 90-minute sitdown meals.
But it just happens to be the same amount paid by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund for a stake in DAZN and the total prize fund which has been stumped up by Fifa.
That has helped quieten objections from clubs who cannot help but be distracted by the fact that the winners stand to take in $125million.
As far as the governing body is concerned, silence might be golden but surely Gianni Infantino and his pals know the moral of the story of the goose which laid eggs of that hue when it was expected to produce more and more.
