There was a time where everyone was bored of international friendlies and sick of their players coming back injured from playing in them. There was a growing suggestion that they needed to be dropped from the football calendar for player welfare.
So, what FIFA and UEFA did, was instead of listening to fans and players on this, they thought up the Nations League which pretty much ended friendlies but made sure the extra games nobody wanted stayed in place.
Clubs don’t help either. The absolute worst way to prepare athletes for a season of performance are these stupid pre-season world tours. Yet, every year players are paraded around America or the Far East on shit pitches and spend more time on planes than they do in training. Pre-season is then cut short because of the FA/PL’s insistence on the season starting in the middle of Summer when most families go on holiday.
We start the season far too early in England. Far too many players/teams have far too little a pre-season, especially anyone who’s played in an international tournament up to July. The amount of injuries in this sport is contributed to by shit and short pre-seasons and too much travel.
Pre-season tours need fucking off and let the actual football and physiology experts at clubs create pre-seasons based on what they think is suitable for professional athletes.
In Pep’s first pre-season with Bayern, he was allowed control of it himself and he played 11 pre-season games, all in Germany (one was against City in a mini-tournament in the Allianz).
If you asked the coaches and sports scientists, physios, Drs etc. at clubs, they’d all agree that games close to home with maybe some warm weather training not too far away in the Med and some altitude training not too far away in the Alps is how you prepare a sports team for a season ahead.
If it was left to the people who should organise pre-season, I bet it would look something like this, from around the first weekend in June:
Week 1 - recovery, week off
Week 2 - recovery, week off
Week 3 - recovery, week off
Week 4 - recovery, week off
Week 6 - training at the CFA
Week 7 - warm weather training somewhere in the Med; plus 1 game
Week 8 - back to training at the CFA; plus 2 games
Week 9 - altitude training somewhere in the Alps; plus 1 game
Week 10 - Local tournament somewhere like Dublin/Glasgow/London/Manchester; 3 games
Week 11 - You’d hope to be in the Community Shield, if not a final training game
Week 12 - season starts
(more pre-season games but more rotation and games seen as training for fitness with all the group being together working on new ideas from the coach).
With the season starting in the final weekend in August. And that would be the same for every league that runs a Winter league in Europe, with the Transfer Window closing on the Thursday before that weekend after being open all Summer.
I wonder if injuries would decrease if that were allowed to be the case? I wonder if this could lead to prolonging the careers of players if they were trained and prepared to there optimal in all aspects of their entire careers?
There should be no international breaks, at all really, but realistically, certainly until October and only two rather than this three before Christmas that’s crept in in the last few years (only ever used to be two, and at one time they used to be just one game in the midweek between club games rather than two games taking a full weekend out of the club season).
The Nations Lesgue needs binning off. Either that or the Euros and World Cup qualification needs binning off and base qualification for them on Nations League performance.
There should be no Winter break, it’s a daft idea that was never needed in decades gone by. It was just seen as trendy because other leagues do it. It takes a weekend out of the club football calendar that just adds one more week onto the season which means either the players get one week’s less rest when they actually need it after the season finishes or it takes one week out of pre-season.
Again, the clubs’ greed in this new CL format that has just introduced a load of games against a random list of eight teams in a giant league table that mean absolutely nothing in relation to other teams’ fixtures in the league because not everybody plays each other. I don’t see the point in this change. It’s not been done for any footballing reasons, it’s simply been done to generate a bit of extra money. These greedy cunts at clubs just use their players as cash-bait.
The players’ welfare is almost as low on the importance scale to clubs as the core local supporters of the clubs are.
The CL should revert back to the 2004-2024 format. There was nothing wrong with it how it was.
