‘We can preach that it isn’t ideal, but ultimately it’s down to the decision-makers’: Why sports science experts are calling for football chiefs to act on fixture congestion before it’s too late

Now that the league business is out of the way and there’s just the small matter of the Champions League final remaining for Man City this weekend, Premier League players can look forward to a rest after an exhausting, jam-packed campaign.

But what’s been the impact of the mid-season World Cup and ever-increasingly congested football calendar? Rachel Roberts takes a deep dive into the impact of the tightening football schedule and hears from senior lecturer in Sport and Exercise Biomechanics at Edge Hill University, Dr Richard Page, on the detrimental consequences it holds for overworked players.

When Qatar was announced as the host of the 2022 World Cup, the unbearable summer heat was just one of many concerns. Unlike the others though, the answer to this problem seemed simple in the eyes of Fifa – just play the tournament in the winter. The knock-on effects of this mid-season interruption have been felt, and likely will continue to be, as calendar congestion has seen seasons bleed into one another. And while this all means frequent football for fans, it is the players who will be the ones to pay.

After factoring in cup and international breaks, a Christmas World Cup, and any other disruptions to the calendar, the 2022/23 Premier League season took place over 200 days, leaving on average 5.26 days between games. Yet despite the extraordinary interruptions, the league schedule appears to be minimally impacted. Compare it with the previous season, where there were two designated international breaks, and a February winter break, there were around 215 days available for a club’s 38 league games to be contested, or 5.66 days between games.

The difference of 0.4 days sounds rather minimal, but the approximate 9.6 hours of recovery time to which it equates is of great consequence. The research of Dr Richard Page, a senior lecturer in Sport and Exercise Biomechanics at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, into fixture congestion and the mechanisms of football injury has revealed that while “different things recover at different rates, every extra hour, extra day would be beneficial and should offset that potential injury risk. Where we have games that are well spaced out, the injury risk was lower.”

Across the spectrum of competitions, the reality for many players has been a game every three days since the World Cup. Dr Page’s research concluded a ‘congested’ classification as “two games within a 96-hour period, but clearly we have the issue in elite football, and potentially in women’s football, where when the commercialisation increases, 96 hours isn’t always an option.”

International encroachment

An area of the game where there has been a notable increase in fixtures is in internationals. The turn of the millennium saw two mid-season international breaks, rising to three by the 2012/13 season. Another decade gave way to further increase to four mid-season international breaks in 2021/22, and now this year has seen two breaks for internationals and a 5.5 week-long World Cup interruption.

This increase in international football is conflating the fixture list and creating football cycles which blend into each other endlessly. The 2000/01 season saw England play nine games, two of which after the season’s conclusion, rising to 13 Three Lions fixtures last season, four of which coming after the league’s finale. There are further Euro qualification matches scheduled in June 2023, just over two weeks after the season ends, and extensive pre-season tours starting in July have increasingly shortened the close season break.

FIFPRO surveying enforces the detriments of such a calendar. High performance coaches recommend an off-season break of four or more weeks, but this is being afforded to players less and less – from 55% in 2018/19 down to 32% of players in 2020/21. Players themselves reported on the sense of season breaks being infringed upon, with 76% of believing additional regulations & enforcement are needed to protect their break periods. As an anonymous player stated in the wake of the World Cup: “We need to put more emphasis on the rest time that international players get. We [had] another international window in March when we could [have been] resting. The workload is huge and there is not enough rest.”

For those based in England this was a particularly excruciating concern. Many Premier League players had around a week either side to prepare for and then recover from the intensity of a World Cup before the domestic calendar picked up again on Boxing Day. Unsurprising, then, that only 38% of England-based players said they felt they had enough time for recovery post-tournament, compared to those based in Germany where 67% of players were positive on the matter (the Bundesliga returned to action in mid-January). Worst still was the reporting of emotional fatigue — 63% of England-based players indicated to FIFPRO ‘extreme’ mental or emotional fatigue, compared to 20% of players en masse.

Specific events of this year created an unprecedented scenario, but Christmas football is an annual tradition. Do organisers allow tradition and their lucrative product to take priority over player welfare? Dr Page is a football fan, same as anyone else: “I quite like watching it over the festive period. But if you put your scientific hat on and think about player welfare you have to ask at what cost is that coming?”

Health implications go beyond the physical

The cost can be substantial. In his systematic review, Dr Page concluded that injury risk increases during congested periods, though the layoff duration is typically shorter. Insignificant recovery times can exacerbate the risk of an injury of any degree, as he told me: “It might be certain injuries that lead to a reduced lay-off period, so players are not out for as long. But there is then research which suggests those minor issues do typically lead to more severe injuries like an ACL or other ligaments problems.” Managers may allow players with accumulative niggles to play, particularly in key matches towards the end of a season, and this could potentially count as a reason for the shorter layoff times reported.

Injuries will always be a part of the sport, but their nature may be changing. As Dr Page explained, research indicates the nature of the game has evolved and so the physical demands on players are also evolving. “It is becoming more of a ‘repeat sprint’ type profile. There’s more distance covered in games, more sprints and high-intensity actions, so not only are we putting players at risk in relation to recovery, then when they’re required to play again and they have to react to the game, they are also required to perform actions which are arguably more difficult than previous seasons.”

Fifty-three per cent of surveyed World Cup players reported injury, or felt more likely to suffer one as a result of fixture congestion. And implications expand beyond the physical, with almost 40% of players stating the demanding workload affected their mental health. The FIFPRO 2022 Player and High Performance Coach surveys summarised: “The increased number of matches players are competing in, across multiple competitions […], is pushing players beyond their limits.”

Protecting player welfare

“Fatigue-induced reductions” in a player’s capacity to cope with the demands of the modern game are potential consequences of the mental and physical pressures, according to Dr Page’s findings. These reductions can be bought upon by the calendar’s squeezing of training time – where players may lower the intensity of their activity in training to accompany their recovery between games, inadvertently reducing their ability to adapt back to a higher pace in match scenarios.

Whilst the Premier League has introduced a winter break in recent seasons, it has long been common in other countries such as Germany. The purpose of which is to allow for a recovery that, in Dr Page’s words, goes “beyond just the mechanical and physiological. There is the mental component in relation to burnout which affects decision-making; when you’re in a tired state towards the end of matches, this may compromise positioning and then increase injury risk.”

FIFPRO cite media reporting of 66 players suffering from injury since the start of the World Cup, 42% of which occurred after the tournament. Liverpool and Netherlands centre-back Virgil van Dijk is a prime example of how the mid-season World Cup challenged players. The defender played 2,897 minutes — the fourth-highest number across August 2022 to January 2023, as well as playing all the minutes he possibly could (543) during the Dutch’s Qatar campaign.

After returning to club action, he picked up a muscular injury against Brentford at the start of January and was out for seven games. “[The lack of rest pre-world cup] caught up with me unfortunately,” he reported to FIFPRO. “My body, I’m not a robot… I played too many games at a time.”

While Van Dijk’s former Celtic team-mate Callum McGregor is no stranger to featuring on lists for the most minutes played in football. During the 2018/19 season, the Scot played more minutes than any other footballer in the world, playing 69 games – 59 for his club and 10 for the national team – for an astonishing total of 5,894 minutes. But as the Hoops captain turns 30 next week, his gruelling playing time will become increasingly unsustainable and may need to be carefully managed by their next boss.

As a players’ trade union body, FIFPRO’s work is invaluable to ensure the voices of the players are heard in the conversations regarding the game. It is significant to frame discussions on fixture congestion in a light more akin to employees in any other industry being overworked, because ultimately that is the case. Dr Page raises such a concern, where the severity of the situation is not being acknowledged. “Sometimes when players moan about these things, it can be watered down to ‘well they earn a lot of money through playing football.’ But in any other company, if we know that the way in which we’re congesting schedules to ultimately make more profit is increasing injury risk, we would probably be looking at this a little better.”

Players’ salaries, all be them at times eye-watering, should not negate their concerns. As in any industry, they are workers producing a valuable product, owed safety and respect from their governing superiors.

Case study: Manchester United’s post-tournament squeeze

Manchester United were challenging for a cup double after securing the Carabao Cup with a 2-0 win over Newcastle in February. Last weekend’s 2-1 FA Cup final defeat by their City rivals was the final fixture of their 62 game-long season, which has averaged around 3.73 days between games. For context, last season’s quadruple-hunters Liverpool played 63 games across a season calendar which averaged around 3.56 days between games. Though there was no mid-season World Cup, playing a game every three days has become the demand of the teams at the top.

There has however been a definitive squeezing of United’s schedule post-Qatar, with the days between games average reducing from 3.86 before the tournament, to around 3.66 days between games afterwards. This ‘pre’ and ‘post’ World Cup split is particularly enlightening regarding the form of striker Marcus Rashford, as it reveals the increase in fixture-turnover has bought an upturn in his performance.

Rashford’s haul stands at 17 league goals, which can be roughly calculated to 0.32 goals per 90 minutes before the tournament, jumping to 0.67 goals per 90 minutes subsequent. This increased output succeeded a World Cup where the striker netted three times and seemed reinvigorated – the change of scene and frequent game time enabled him to find form which lasted.

However, he has since picked up injuries, during a clash against Everton last month, and a leg injury which ruled him out of a mid-May tie against Wolves. The Toffees game was United’s third league game in a week, having played Brentford on the Wednesday and Newcastle the Sunday before. For manager Erik ten Hag, this injury was “due to the schedule.” As he told BT Sport post-match, “some things you can’t avoid, but that was avoidable. The players can’t recover that quickly and we all know the science. I think we have to protect the players.”

Multiple Man United players were highlighted in FIFPRO’s player and coaches 2022 survey. Specifically, Rashford and Bruno Fernandes were noted for playing runs of 23 and 21 ‘back-to-back’ matches respectively (what FIFPRO define as games with less than five days of recovery in-between), in the 2020/21 season. Harry Maguire was also spotlighted as one of the most extreme examples in the survey, playing 100% of minutes in a run of 19 ‘back-to-back’ matches between December 2020 and February 2021. His workload was the most excessive of all players featured, averaging only 3.39 days between games. The implications of this are best summarised by team-mate Raphael Varane: “We have overloaded schedules and play non-stop. Right now, I feel like I’m suffocating, and that the player is gobbling up the man.”

So, what now?

With an increasing volume of research being published in this area, Dr Page is hopeful that considered changes can be implemented in the future. “When we write this research, we like to think that there will be things acted upon. With more people being more vocal about it, with scientific literature backing things up then hopefully there needs to be some sort of consideration as to what we need to do [going forward].”

Therefore, it’s important now to get ahead of the curve and help players become better accustomed to cope with the demands. “We’ve not got crystal balls — we will never be able to say that someone will get injured. Some players can play on a regular basis; it’s understanding those who can cope with repeat occasions and those who may be susceptible.”

Yet no matter what concerns Dr Page and his colleagues raise in their work, the business side of the game has always taken precedence in decision-making. It may only be when the product is seriously hindered through injuries or other player issues that governing bodies may feel inclined to act. “With these FIFPRO reports, managers in the public eye raising concerns, scientific research, we like to think that it will be acted on. We’re aware that we can preach that it isn’t ideal, but ultimately it’s down to the decision-makers to make a call on the number of games.”

They will need to make one sooner rather than later, before serious damage is done to players. After all, the game is nothing without them.

Follow Rachel on Twitter @rachellrobertts

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