“Play and shut your mouth” … Faced with the hellish pace, when will the footballers’ Big Night?

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Great lord, the boss of world football Gianni Infantino has decided to send Arsène Wenger to the fire in front of the national team coaches to discuss his new fad of the biennial World Cup on Tuesday. The opportunity for Didier Deschamps and his friends to put on the table the question of the 2022-2023 calendar, tinkered with a chisel to make room for the World Cup in Qatar and which will only leave them one week to prepare for the major event of a life as a coach.

This advert, which comes a few days after the immense
rant from Thibaut Courtois against the infernal cadences inflicted on the selection players, once again revives the debate on overloaded schedules in football.

Philippe Piat, the president of the UNFP and Fifpro, did not really fall out of the closet when he heard the news. “As soon as we agreed to move the World Cup to November-December, we knew we were going to have a specific schedule for the 2022-2023 season. But at the time I remember that we were relying on a minimum of 15 days of preparation rather than a week, ”confides, fatalistic, the Philippe Martinez of the round ball. Not having direct access to Didier Deschamps’ red phone, 20 minutes asked the opinion of another contender for the Qatari adventure, Vahid Halilhodzic, the Morocco coach.

“The people who decided that do not have the slightest skill or knowledge of how to prepare for such an event … This decision is unacceptable”, he scolds in the preamble. For the former PSG coach, it would even be a sin to talk about “preparation”: “What do you want us to prepare in a week? Nothing at all ! It’s just going to be recovery. The brain does not have time to assimilate the principles of the game in selection with such a rhythm, such changes from one competition to another. Between the tactical work on the ground and the video preparation, with the time that will be allocated to us, it is practically mission impossible. “

Fifpro launches a new alert

Only positive point with this autumn formula, the players will arrive physically fresh, even if it is not forbidden to think that some will stick their tongue out a little after having stuffed the group stage of C1 in accelerated between September 6 and November 2. The problem is that the health of the players does not stop at the door of the World Cup and that once it is over, it will be necessary to start again with coal to investigate the matches in clubs without interruption until the month of June. 2023, without a winter break.

Take the example of a Kylian Mbappé: by counting on the possibility that the Blues will go to the final in Doha, he could theoretically play up to 30 games in the space of 5 months, roughly a crazy rhythm of a match every three or four days between August and December 2022. And between the final of the World Cup and the resumption of Ligue 1, ten poor days will have passed…

Now, what does the latest study commissioned by Fifpro entitled “At the limit”, about the playing times of the internationals? That these “put players’ health at risk” and that “the rate of muscle injuries in professional football is higher in matches played 5 days apart or less according to a 14-year-old prospective study which observed more of 130,000 matches ”.

“With so many games every three days, it’s going to be limitable. We will find ourselves in the configuration of last year when we played every three days because of the Covid, we saw the cascade of injury that there was ”, breathes Emmanuel Valence, physical trainer at the VAFC. Aware of the problem, Fifpro has issued a number of recommendations:

  • The introduction of compulsory 4-week breaks at the end of the season, and compulsory 2-week breaks in mid-season.
  • A limit on the number of times per season where players must chain competitive matches with less than five days of recovery.
  • Consider imposing a maximum number of annual matches for each player to protect their health and performance.

“We have noticed for years that there are more and more injuries, it cannot last like that, the actors must be taken into account other than as pawns that we move as we see fit on a chessboard. We urgently need to put in place procedures to regulate all this, ”claims Philippe Piat.

When football gets to do worse than rugby

A bit like rugby, which, although often mocked for its extravagant World Cup calendars, has over the years been able to establish safeguards to preserve the physical and mental health of players. “During the 2019 World Cup, we negotiated that the players would benefit from a week off at the end of the World Cup, plus a week of preparation before returning to the top 14,” says Raphaël Vohringer, the legal manager of Provale, the French players’ union. For example, the captain of the XV of France Guilhem Guirado had benefited from 20 days of rest (and fitness) between the elimination in the quarters against the Welsh and his return to the league with Montpellier. It testifies :

“It’s still complicated today but things have changed for the better. There are compulsory recovery phases before and after the World Cups, it has really evolved from when I started playing pro and I’m proud to have seen that. I saw it, I perceived it and, above all, I felt it in my body. “

Dialogue, listening, this is precisely what is lacking in football, where authorities seem to think only of their apple. Philippe Piat: “I wrote to FIFA about ten days ago to complain about the calendars, but above all about the way in which it tried to impose its views on the rest of football. We have an agreement with FIFA which obliges it to consult us on collective football-related problems, but within the framework of the World Cup every two years, it did not do so because it knew that we were opposed to it. “

For the one who will give up his chair of president of the international union on November 16, “governance must change, professional football no longer falls within the remit of FIFA but of clubs, because professional football is between clubs. and the players, between employers and employees. We are going to intervene on this because it cannot go on like this any longer. “

“Between UEFA and FIFA, it’s a bit of who pisses the furthest”

“For the players, we have the impression that it is” play and shut your mouth “, fumed for his side coach Vahid. Whether at FIFA or UEFA, everything is only political, everyone wants to impose their vision of football according to their own interests. “Between UEFA and FIFA, forgive me the expression, but it is a bit to who pisses the furthest”, engages Piat. When Gianni Infantino battles behind the scenes to swallow his biennial World Cup project, his UEFA counterpart is rubbing his hands with his new version of the Champions League, with more matches to be won, after having already widened the Euro to 24 teams.

What then remains for the players to be heard? If he admits that their “room for maneuver is reduced”, Philippe Piat imagines “a threat of strike or the organization of luckings, for example by refusing to start certain matches on time, which may seem trivial but which not at all from a broadcasters and TV rights point of view ”. If it is hard to imagine that the Big Evening of footballers is for tomorrow, the boss of FIFPro is less fatalistic: “By pushing the plug, it can come faster than you think. “


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