The arbitration hearing into Manchester City’s legal complaint against the Premier League gets underway today in London.
The hearing is expected to last two weeks and has been billed as a defining moment for English football. Will City – and their would-be imitators Newcastle – make a bonfire of the regulations that currently prevent trillionaire owners of football clubs pouring unlimited money into their pet teams, ensuring nobody else can possibly compete? Or will it be a win for the little people?
Little people like . . . Liverpool chairman Tom Werner, who told the Financial Times last week: “I’m determined one day to have a Premier League game be played in New York City. I even have the sort of crazy idea that there would be a day where we play one game in Tokyo, one game a few hours later in Los Angeles, one game a few hours later in Rio, one game a few hours later in Riyadh and make it sort of a day where football, where the Premier League is celebrated . . .”
Whichever way you look, the current structure of football is threatened by powerful forces demanding transformative change in their own interests. Among those eagerly following the outcome of the City case will be Fifa, whose own big plans for reshaping the game have lately encountered resistance from stakeholders.
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The international players’ union Fifpro and the World Leagues Association (WLA), which represents 48 football leagues around the world (including Europe’s big five), have threatened legal action against the world governing body over their plans for the expanded Club World Cup, which is due to take place in the United States next year.
This is a genuinely World Cup-sized and patterned 32-team tournament, in contrast to the existing seven-team Club World Cup, which Fifa intend to retain under the new name of Intercontinental Cup.
The new tournament is supposed to take place next year in the United States from June 15th to July 13th. So players at competing clubs will only finish their season at a date when they would usually have been expected to return for preseason training.
Reports suggest the participating clubs will be paid sums ranging from €50 million to €100 million. So despite chief executive Richard Masters’ objections, the Premier League’s World Club Cup representatives, Manchester City and Chelsea, will not be turning down their invitations.
Fifpro presented statistics on the worrying trends in player workload at an event in London before the Champions League final. Among their findings: Vinicius Jr has played more than twice as many matches as Ronaldinho had by the age of 24 (344 against 162 – and Vini Jr is still only 23). Jude Bellingham has played almost five times as many minutes as David Beckham had by the age of 21.
It’s obvious where this will lead. Burnout is increasingly visible at football’s top level, and not just among players. Jurgen Klopp spent years complaining about the fixture pile-up until he decided to step away from top-level management at 56, an age when a coach would traditionally have been considered near his peak.
Neymar, one of the greatest players of his generation, had quite plainly fallen out of love with football long before the serious knee injury that has prevented him from playing since last autumn. Is that really so surprising when, as he prepared to move to PSG in 2017 aged 25, he had already played nearly 500 senior matches for Santos, Barcelona and Brazil? At PSG the wear and tear manifested in increasingly frequent injuries, and he ultimately missed more than 50% of the league matches in his six seasons at the club.
A similar pattern can be seen with other very precocious young players. Eden Hazard had played 450 matches by the time he turned 25. You think of that as being the rough halfway point of a player’s career, but actually Hazard had already played more than two-thirds of the matches he would ever play.
Raheem Sterling played nearly 400 matches by 25 and now seems old before his time. Nobody was surprised when a 29-year old player who had made five tournament squads in a row did not make the cut for this Euros. Another who seems burned out is Marcus Rashford – a first-team regular for Manchester United and a tournament player for England at 18, now at 26 the veteran of 462 senior matches.
In the past the game did not demand so much from players. Take Frank Lampard, regarded as one of the most durable players at the top level. He made his Premier League debut at 17, yet by the time he turned 25 he had played just over 300 matches. Even James Milner, a prodigy who made his Premier League debut at 16, had only played around 350 matches by his 25th birthday.
According to Fifpro’s data, there was a three-way tie for which player had played the most matches in 23-24, with John McGinn (Aston Villa and Scotland), Fredrik Aursnes (Benfica and Norway) and Saud Abdulhamid (Al-Hilal and Saudi Arabia) all playing 66.
Aursnes announced his retirement from international football in March, aged just 28.
“I feel that I want to have more time and freedom to prioritise other things in my life besides football, which is very difficult in the face of a year full of scheduled matches,” he said in a statement.
The surprise is that there are not more like Aursnes already. The usual objection to players’ complaining about having to play too many games is that they get paid so much money they should shut up and suck it up. But beyond a certain point of earnings, extra money starts to become less important.
Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the English PFA, says players have told him: “Yes, I’m a millionaire but I don’t have time to spend money. So what is the point?”
Maybe we’re not far off the point where players dread the call telling them congratulations, they’ve made the squad for the tournament.
