The Fifpro union representing professional football players around the world expressed alarm on Thursday at the infernal pace of recent sports calendars, calling for “urgent reform” in support of a study carried out among a thousand footballers.
“The pressure exerted on the health of the players reveals the crisis of governance of our sport”, with “an obsolete model which considers the players as resources”, explains Fifpro, which asks the organizers of competitions to listen “to the players and what their body makes us hear”.
The union relies on the figures of its study carried out between October and December 2021 with 1,055 professional players, and a hundred experts (coaches, doctors, scientists, physical trainers), questioned on the overloaded calendar of the last seasons. .
Some 54% of the players surveyed admitted to having suffered an injury due to the overloaded schedule.
Fifpro claims that 41% of the players on its panel have already chained at least once 10 matches in a row without ever having more than four days off between two matches, since 2018.
The most unsustainable pace is attributed to Luka Modric (Real Madrid), who has played up to 24 matches in a row without having more than four days off between two of them, during the 2020-2021 season, i.e. four times more than the “recommended maximum”.
The union is also concerned about the shortening of the off-season periods. Less than a third of players surveyed had at least four weeks off in the offseason in 2019-20 and 2020-21.
And some extreme cases alert the organization, such as that of the Spaniard Mikel Oyarzabal, who had only six days off between the Olympics and the resumption of training at Real Sociedad last summer.
This accumulation of fatigue would also have significant psychological effects, according to the Fifpro study: 82% of the experts questioned observed mental health problems concerning players who were victims of an overloaded schedule.
“We are athletes, not machines. Our bodies and our minds have natural limits. When we do too much or we rest too little, we crack”, worry in a forum the professional players, represented in particular by several big names like Leonardo Bonucci, Jonathan David and Arturo Vidal.
