Football’s HUGE Problem That’s Only Getting Bigger

Player fatigue and fixture congestion are causing more harm to football players than they ever have been.

Players are dropping like flies and the product is being diluted because of it.

How long will this go on for and how will this affect the game overall.

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Transcript and sources: https://footballiconic.com/football-huge-problem-player-fatigue-and-fixture-congestion/
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00:00 – Introduction
02:05 – More minutes, more injuries
08:44 – What has been said and stats?
11:41 – Super League vs Champions League

Background music:
@pinkxo (Prod Pink)

Producer: Tinashe Chipako
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In 2020 21, Pedri played 75 games in a single season for both club and country. It’s very impressive, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. This was his first ever season as a Barcelona player, and he had only just turned 18. Fast forward to late 2023, And the man is borderline injury prone.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody. Gavi? Another golden boy and still only 19 right now. About 150 professional games played in the past two and a half years and currently out for the season after an ACL tear. Ansu Fati? Once Blaugrana’s golden boy himself, same age as Pedri, also injury prone.

Now, this is not a Barcelona thing. Players of all nationalities and ages at the top level are all dropping like flies for one reason or another. Premier Injuries, a website offering detailed Prem injury insights and analysis, Reported in late November 2023, that there has been a 23 percent

Increase in occurrences of injury this season over last year at that stage. A 14 percent increase over the average of the last 4 seasons. Load management seems to be a massive issue these days. Jurgen Klopp must be wondering why so many people are all so late to the party when

It comes to being concerned about this. Now to just say playing more games equates to more injuries, sounds too simplistic. Nonetheless, the more games you play, the more chances you have of getting hurt. It’s not exactly rocket science. Couple that with the ever increasing intensity of games and a mid

Season World Cup, and a massive problem starts to take shape. And this problem is not going anywhere. The Champions League from next season? More games. The World Cup from 2026? More games, the Nations League and much much more and don’t even get me started on

The renewed efforts for the Super League We’ll save that for later in the video How bad is the current situation and how will this affect the game as we know it? What’s going on everyone? Hope you’re all doing well. I’m Tinashe. Welcome back to the channel The rising number in injuries in

European football is pretty alarming. Teams are all suffering and while we’re all giving this issue the attention it deserves I’m not sure if we’re all giving it the consideration it deserves. If Casemiro is fit all year, do Man Utd concede as many goals which

Originate from careless play in the midfield, which is almost every goal they concede these days, mind you? If De Bruyne and John Stones are fit, do Man City suffer their recent slump? If James Madison doesn’t pick up his ankle injury, do Spurs continue the blistering form they started the season off with?

It’s hard to tell. But what we can say is that almost everybody in the industry is affected somehow. As touched on in the intro, there are a lot of reasons that people have pointed to that have contributed to all of this. This season in particular, we’ve seen added time counters go

Way up in the Premier League. I would say that this has calmed down somewhat in the past few days, but over the first 10 weeks of this current Premier League season, 100 minutes in a Premier League game was Pretty much standard. And the reasoning made sense, a direct nullification to infuriating time wasting,

And a way to make sure that players are given the time that they’re entitled to. An extremely scattered schedule which included an irregular winter world cup, european winter that is. Is one of them, and this is a reason that actually has some pretty recent presidential data.

Back in 20 20 21, the number of injuries by late November summed up to 194. Only two of this year’s numbers and a 15% increase on the 1920 season. And we all remember what happened in the 1920 year, yes? Covid. A year that included an erratic playing schedule, including behind closed doors

Matches, large breaks in competitive play, no full pre season, and much more. Illness is included in the much more category. Maintaining functional fitness is unsurprisingly harder when your routine is thrown out of whack. Out of all the managers in the Premier League at the moment, Jurgen Klopp.

Has probably been the most vocal amongst them when it comes to slamming the congested playing schedules that players have. That’s what I’m talking about all the time when I say we have to reduce games, FA Cup or whatever. Whether it’s England’s intense year end winter schedule or a lack of

Consideration when teams are in multiple competitions, can you really blame them? Back in 2021, Liverpool were in contention for just about every single competition late into the year. They had just won the FA Cup Final, and then they had to play their penultimate

Game of the Premier League season, I think like two, maybe three days later. In 1920, they had to play a League Cup quarterfinal on the 17th of December, and a Club World Cup semi final on the 18th. And then a Club World Cup final on the 21st if they progressed,

Which everyone knew they would. And surprise surprise, they prioritized the Club World Cup and sent their academy to play in the League Cup, which a lot of people were mad about in the press. And it’s like, come on guys, what do you expect?

Liverpool won the league with 99 points this year, and a villa side that were one point from relegation that year scored five on them with no response. It should have been more, actually. And then we have the year end fixtures.

A period which sees about two or three games being played in a single week for almost every single Premier League side. Meanwhile, the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1, they all take winter breaks for a varying number of weeks. One reason is weather, naturally. Another is to, well, take a break.

If anybody out there has a detailed breakdown for the injuries occurred in the Premier League in that late December slash early January period, compared to other top leagues in the world, You gotta drop the numbers in the comments. I couldn’t find any meaningful comparative data but There has to be a correlation, right?

Klopp is and has always been onto something. Here’s the thing though. For the sake of looking at both sides, I’m gonna go ahead and play devil’s advocate here. The reality of life is that the reward for hard work is often more hard work. Or rather, more opportunity.

Getting a promotion at work means you now have to prove why you got it in the first place over and over again. Being good and progressing in competitions means you get the chance to go further. It also means you’ll not only be playing more, but also playing better teams.

Which will be more taxing. For several decades, this is always how football has been. Real Madrid, 2002. Chelsea, 2005. Manchester United, 2008. Barcelona, 2009. Bayern Munich, 2013. PSG, 2020. Man City, 2023. These teams all had to put up with 60 plus games per season, and

Competition formats haven’t really changed all that much since then. Now, there was noise made for each of these individual teams, but Not nearly as much fuss was made about this particular issue for those teams. Or at least, for most of those teams. You could argue that the intensity of football has drastically risen

Over the years, which might result in more breaks being warranted. But that doesn’t have much to do with In the case of Klopp, I guess it doesn’t exactly help that his teams play heavy metal football. Congested fixture schedules or not, players will suffer from burnout.

We’ve seen it happen twice now in his eight years at Liverpool. Maybe we need to be looking at modern training methods too. Again, I actually agree with everything that Klopp has to say about this issue. I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, trying to look at both sides.

I’m also just thinking out loud a little bit. That’s kind of what this channel is meant for, that’s the purpose. You guys, please feel free to fact check me in the comments. I read all of them as you guys know.

One thing is for sure, whether the problem is the current systems or not, this issue is not going to be made any better by the proposed new formats for all of our favourite competitions. The 2026 World Cup will include 48 teams as opposed to the regular 32.

This will push the number of overall games from 64 to 80. The 2024 25 Champions League will include 36 teams as opposed to the regular 32, with a completely revamped group stage. The number of overall games goes from 125 to 189.

On the surface, having more games sounds fantastic to all of us, right? More games to watch. However, it leads to an increased risk factor. Now, I have a medical degree, so all of you can 100 percent trust everything I’m about to say.

When it comes down to it, increasing the number of games played leads to increases in the chances of injury. Whether it be due to increased exposure to Bruno Gimmarich flying into you and not being guarded, or simply a strain on a hamstring, this can’t lead to anything good.

And it obviously doesn’t need mentioning that having the best players drop out of contention for large portions of a season, Will utimately dilute the product. Let’s laser in and focus on some individuals for this next bit. In the intro, we spoke about the Barcelona boys, players that have been ran into

The ground by the time they’re 21. Questions over load management have been rife over the past couple of years. Again, this isn’t isolated. Similar concerns have been raised about players like Bukayo Saka and Jude Bellingham. Bukayo Saka is still very much Arsenal’s best player, but he’s not. At his best.

That much is clear as day to anyone that’s been observing his meteoric rise. I watch a good amount of Arsenal matches, and almost every time I’ve done so lately, I’ve been left thinking one thing in particular. That man looks tired.

Not not being able to move tired, just not really being all that sharp tired. Um, it’s not really from a lack of effort, I don’t think. I think he just needs a break. And it’s quite worrying that the cycle is being allowed to continue like this.

Wayne Rooney is one of the greatest players of all time, yet from 29 or 28, he declined rapidly to age where he should have been in his peak. There is strong belief that a big contributor to this was the fact that

He had played just under 150 games of professional football at the highest level before he turned 20 years old. Although I will say that perhaps Rooney isn’t the greatest example, he was under so much pressure for club and country that he turned to booze very early on behind closed doors. Listen.

I’m not going to sit here and act like I know when too much is too much. These guys are all very young and they need lots of experience to become the leaders of global football that they really should be within the next 5 years or so.

Again, I have a medical degree, but it’s tough for even me to tell sometimes. While studies do exist on the matter, like this one here, we don’t need scientific studies to confirm this information for us. We have all the information that we need right in front of us.

All we really need is the good old fashioned eye test. Players look exhausted, but on this study in particular, a systematic review on fixture congestion, the authors make reference to something that is also seemingly quite obvious, but that I don’t think many think too deeply about.

Changes in competitions, club, and national team setups often require different training routines with different tactics, personnel, and approaches. In a rolling cycle, this could potentially be quite taxing mentally. and physically. Raphael Varane is another player that’s been really put to work.

According to ThiefPro, between mid 2018 and mid 2023, he played in 248 matches. That works out to roughly 50 games a year. 58 percent of those were back to back, with less than 5 days rest. He also travelled about 229, 244 kilometers in that time frame. The result?

He is also now borderline injury prone and retired from international football at 29. I’m afraid that we will witness much shorter careers and that players will have to give up the France team very early because physically or mentally, what we are asking for today is simply beyond limits.

Those were Varane’s words after his retirement from the national team. With all the talk of more and more games and corporate greed, in a sense, we kinda have to mention the Super League. It’s back. In 2021, the Super League was presented to the world and it was met with insane backlash.

A basically closed off league with no relegations for founding members goes against just about everything that competitive football stands for. When they saw that fans unsurprisingly were against it, most of the teams distanced themselves from the competition faster than Andrus Townsend restored his hairline. No shade, this is miraculous.

With no top clubs, particularly English clubs. There is no Super League. It helps that UEFA were willing to ban any club that participated in the Super League from the Champions League. That’s pretty strong motivation, I’d say. Real Madrid, Barcelona, and for the longest time, Juventus were the

Only clubs that remained, but since mid 2023, even Juventus formally began their pulling out process. The Super League looked dead in the water. Until late 2023, when news hit our timelines stating that the European Court of Justice was closed. Deemed UEFA and FIFA to be unlawful in denying clubs from

Participating in other competitions. Super League 2. 0, Revenge of Florentino Perez. This seemed like a huge win for the Super League, and taking the opportunity and the media attention that had presented itself, the new proposed format for the Super League was presented to the world.

A three league system with promotion and relegation, opportunities for entry by new clubs through domestic sporting merit, and even free viewing for matches. I suspect on platforms like YouTube. It sounds pretty good, right? Except they still need teams to voluntarily want to participate.

And every team remembers just how badly they got burnt last time. Manchester United came out and dismissed any involvement including them and the Breakaway League. I think they were the first. They did it so fast that people weren’t even able to create fake rumors. A lot of journalists are starving right now.

Almost every top team went out and You know, condemned the league shortly after that. Even PSG came out with their own statement. PSG weren’t even part of the original teams that wanted to do this breakaway league. Leave it to Paris to make Nasser Al Khalifi look good. Bundesliga clubs?

They read the subject line of the email and binned it immediately. You’ll sooner catch Joan Laporta in Lederhosen than see any Bundesliga clubs entertain a Super League. It’s not rocket science as to why clubs reacted like this. Calls of greedy, out of touch suits and premium boxes trying to

Squeeze everything they can out of fans were too loud to ignore. No way they want to go through that again. But, again, to play devil’s advocate, I completely understand why this project is so desirable. How else is the rest of Europe supposed to play catch up with England?

If anyone’s missed it, details on the new domestic broadcasting deal that the Premier League just signed was made public almost a month ago. A four year, 6. 7 billion pound deal for domestic rights starting from the 2025 26 season. That’s 1. 7 billion pounds per season distributed across the teams.

In the previous cycle, or rather the current cycle, the combined international TV rights for the Premier League are worth more than the domestic rights. Which is pretty insane, right? The demand for Premier League football around the world is unprecedented. I can only imagine that this is a trend that’s gonna continue as

These new deals are renegotiated. These numbers blow every other league across the world completely out of the water. By comparison, La Liga’s current deal running to 2027 is worth 850 million pounds per season. That’s a lot of money, but it’s about half. The Super League already exists. It’s called the Premier League.

Barcelona may have won La Liga last year, but listen, it’s no secret. Everybody knows. They need money. If you don’t believe me, how else would you explain Barcelona playing a mid week fixture in the United States? In the middle of December, the Super League is the grandfather of all leavers.

Real Madrid might be the best run club and the most continually successful club of all time and will likely always do very well. They even have that shiny new stadium, but they probably feel hard done by in a sense. 14 Champions League titles.

Yet, teams in the bottom half of the Premier League are earning only a few million euros less than them in broadcasting revenue per season. Couple this with the bottomless pockets of Saudi Arabia, and a feeling that shareholder value isn’t being maximized will inevitably creep in. Perez surely feels they deserve more.

It’s the only way I can explain the fact that he is the leader of the whole operation. It is greed. As the only remaining teams in the project. It’s said that Barcelona and Real Madrid will receive a loyalty bonus for their

Commitment to the project after all this time if the league comes to fruition. That’s up to 1 billion euros each. This buys Barcelona a get out of jail free card for all of their recent financial mismanagement. And makes Perez even more powerful than he already is in global football.

I spoke to Florentino Perez and we agree on meeting with other entrepreneurs to discuss about future plans. Football is being managed by old people with no vision. Napoli’s president, Aurelio De Laurentiis, said this while showing support to the Super League. He is 74 years old.

At the end of the day, this video isn’t meant to say that any organization has the moral high ground or anything. There is no obvious good guy here. FIFA, UEFA, the organizers of the Super League, they all seem to be making decisions right now based on increasing revenue.

Which, mind you, isn’t necessarily inherently a bad thing, that’s kind of why we all go to work, right? But when you’re doing so at the expense of not only your customer base in an industry that has working class roots, but you’re also doing it at

The expense of the actual product and money makers in their eyes, I guess, i. e. players, you’re acting in very, very bad faith. What will become of the Super League, efforts regarding player wellness, and the overall quality of the beautiful game? I don’t know. But the way things are going, everyone will suffer.

And there we have it. Let me know what you guys think of the current situation. Feel free to leave all your comments in the description. Feel free to follow all the socials if you want. Feel free to subscribe. That’s all for me today. Hope you guys enjoyed. Hope you’re having a great day.

Cheers and I will catch you in the next one.