Qatari yoke – Kommersant newspaper No. 40 (7485) of 03/10/2023

The International Association of Professional Football Players (FIFPro) drew attention to the negative consequences of the excessively compressed calendar of the current season and the specific timing of the next World Cup: it took place not in the summer, as usual, but at the end of last year. A report released by FIFPro claims that they led to increased injuries, as well as extreme psychological and physical fatigue of the players. This primarily concerns the participants of the Qatari world championship, who actually lost any rest.

FIFPro, international football union, published research conducted jointly with the analytical company Football Benchmark. It covers the period from last summer to the end of January and is dedicated to the loads that have fallen on the players this season and the impact of the calendar on their condition.

The reasons for the emergence of the study are now clear. The fact is that the structure of the current season is extremely specific due to the timing of the World Cup that came to it. Top football tournaments are usually held in the summer, during a fairly long off-season in the major leagues. However, the International Football Federation (FIFA) postponed the Qatari tournament to the end of 2022: it opened on November 20 and ended with the final on December 18, in which the Argentina national team beat French. The World Cup is almost at the center of the FIFPro report, based on statistics and a survey of 64 football players who played in Qatar.

The lion’s share of the study illustrates the colossal amount of workload that fell on the players in the season, including due to the characteristics of the most important tournament.

Tightly embedded in an already rigid club calendar, he left the representatives of the leagues included in the “Big Five of Europe” – English, Spanish, German, Italian and French – only about two weeks to prepare for it in their national teams, as well as, in fact, deprived the vast majority of them of rest after the end of the championship, before returning to the clubs to play in official matches. More than half of the 831 players included in the official Qatari applications, as it turned out, were forced to enter the field before the New Year, and more or less long holidays, if we take the strongest leagues, went only to the players from the German championship: its restart took place at the end of January. For some players, the vacation after the Qatari campaign was even a matter of days. For example, defender Kamil Glick played for his club Benevento from the second Italian division in four days after the relegation of the Polish national team.

FIFPro paid attention to other factors related to the World Cup. For example, to the excessive compaction of his calendar, in which 64 matches were “packed” into just 29 days instead of a month or more, as usual, as well as to an unexpected innovation in the FIFA regulations in the form of a radical increase in added time for meetings: on average in Qatar, it was 11.6 minutes, which is almost twice as much as at the previous championship in Russia in 2018.

The most interesting part of the study is the conclusions about the negative impact of the calendar on the state of the players. FIFPro and its partners have provided data from press reports on post-World Championship injuries up to 30 January. In total, there were 76 of them, and 66 athletes were injured (some had more than one injury). This is 8% of the total number of players from the applications of the national teams at the World Cup – an indicator for such a short period of time and is indeed strikingly high. Moreover, FIFPro emphasizes that minor damages are not taken into account: they are most often ignored by the media. At the same time, as you know, the World Cup itself faced a wave of injuries, including injuries to leading players. Some of them – such as the owner of the “Golden Ball” Frenchman Karim Benzema – never played on it.

They confirm the version about the negative impact of the World Cup and the overloaded calendar, in principle, on the condition of the players and the results of the FIFPro survey.

• 53% of respondents admitted that, due to the peculiarities of the calendar, they either got injured or felt it was “highly likely”.
• In addition, 44% of those surveyed experienced either increased or “extreme” physical fatigue, and 20% experienced extreme psychological fatigue.

Finally, the statements of the players complete the picture.

French defender Raphael Varane, for example, compared the calendar of the season with a constantly rotating “washing machine” that the players got into. It has also been called “monstrous” and “suicidal”.

Commenting on the results of the study, FIFPro Secretary General Jonas Baer-Hoffman expressed concern about the “excessive” workload on football players. However, the union has long been fighting with FIFA to ease the calendar for the sake of the “health and safety” of athletes, but so far this struggle has not borne any fruit. On the contrary, the calendar is only getting tougher. Fresh decisions of the head football structure testify rather that the opinion of FIFPro does not bother her at all – in comparison, in any case, with the financial benefit from tournaments. FIFA has already gone for the “enlargement” of the next world championship, which in 2026 will be hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. Not 32, but 48 teams will take part in it, and they will hold at least 80 meetings (and there is a variant of the tournament scheme, in which there are more than 100 of them). In addition, in 2025, the federation is going to restart the Club World Cup in a new, expanded compared to the current seven teams format, which provides for the participation of 32 clubs.

Alexey Dospekhov