HRhodri experienced physical and mental fatigue precisely in the week of the premiere of the new format in the Champions League: more teams, more matches, more money, more fatigue, more injuries, less spectacle. The next day Javier Tebas proved that he was right and again denounced an overloaded calendar. All this happened the week when the match of the 5th round of the Liga was played on Monday, an early match of the 7th round on Tuesday, a late match of the 3rd round on Wednesday, another early match of the 7th round on Thursday and, finally, an updated match of the 6th round on Friday, four more matches on Saturday, four more matches on Sunday and the last match on Monday 23. After that Round 6, on Tuesday 24 (three clashes), Wednesday 25 (two) and Thursday 26 (three) the remaining eight matches of Round 7 will be played. On Friday the 27th will be the turn of the match of the 8th round , on Saturday there will be four, on Sunday four more and on Monday one. Since you’ve probably missed it by now, we’ll sum it up: 18 continuous days of football in the Spanish championship, which if only stopped because the next two days is the Champions League round again.
Assuming the evidence that football is burdened by everyone and that no one, starting with UEFA and FIFA as the theoretical guarantors of the player’s Health, wants to part with a grain of his share in the juicy distribution of the economic pie, many questions arise. Are football players willing to stand up for a drop in matches that will inevitably lower their very high income? Is the union consisting of 65,000 members mature and supportive enough, of which only less than 5% are elite who suffer from such excessive workload? Will the authorities, in their incompatible capacity as organizers of the game and organizers of club competitions, abandon the recently created tournaments (FIFA with the Club World Cup and UEFA with the Nations League)? Are the players finally realizing that it is they, the football players, who maintain the football industry and not the other way around? What role will the Premier League draft play in this struggle as a pressure gauge? If a strike is reached, which competitions will the stoppage affect: those clubs at National, International or national team level? How long will fans continue to take for granted the blatant decline in the quality of the game in parallel with the increase in ticket prices?
