A FIFPRO report on the 2024-25 football season highlights concerns over the amount of football players in the men’s game are playing. Key findings cover several areas of concern, perhaps most notably continued calendar congestion and extreme heat.
The put an enormous strain on the players, with some, such as , having their seasons stretch over almost an entire year as a result.
The report notes that Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Manchester City and Bayern Munich all had their off-seasons and preseasons for the current campaign severely shortened because of the competition. Without improved safeguarding and better load management, there is concern that the participation of many players at the is at risk.
The FIFPRO report founds that the consensus of medical experts is that competition regulations should include a minimum of four weeks between seasons and a minimum of two days between appearances to allow for adequate recovery, and that the increased burden of travel should be considered when scheduling fixtures.
“You’ve got the perfect storm of how not to treat a human,” FIFPRO consultant Dr. Darren Burgess told journalists in a media call to present the report.
“You’ve got players playing a large number of games followed by fewer than the recommended off-season days and preseason days followed by a large number of games again,” he said. “The cycle keeps repeating.”
“This leads to injury at worst and at best reduced capacity to perform,” he said.
Heat a concern
One of the other major concerns in the report was heat, which was highlighted for the first time five years after FIFPRO started delivering these annual reports.
“This year, with the impact at the Club World Cup, and the pathway towards the World Cup in the US, it felt necessary to include it in the report this year,” FIFPRO Director of Policy and Strategic Relations Alexander Bielefeld said.
“The risk to player health is clearly rising,” he added.
, the report found that four games in the United States reached a temperature above 28 degrees Celsius WetBulb Globe Temperature (82 degrees Fahrenheit WBGT), which under FIFPRO guidelines meant they should have been postponed. A further 17 games saw temperatures that were close to the cancellation threshold.
“This is an issue that affects a lot of different playing markets in the context of a warming planet,” according to the report. “The Club World Cup was a wake-up call in this regard and a bad example of how to properly deal with the circumstances.”
On one occasion, had their substitutes sit inside because temperatures outside were too high.
“The harder and longer athletes play, the greater their heat exposure, increasing risks from fatigue and dizziness to heat stroke and long-term illnesses,” Manal Azzi, an occupational health and safety expert for the International Labor Organization, told FIFPRO.
According to the FIFPRO report, six of the 16 host cities for the World Cup face conditions classified as “extreme risk” for heat-related illness, which is a concern for players and fans. With 48 teams involved across three countries with three varied climates, increased fatigue is a serious risk.
This matter is made more complicated by US President , who recently said he would move matches from host cities he deemed too dangerous, charging that San Francisco and Seattle were “run by radical left lunatics.”
What happens next?
With FIFPRO currently engaged in legal action against FIFA for the congested nature of the calendar and voices from the playing group growing even louder, there is hope that tangible change is on the way. The players’ union believes that years of accumulated data gives more weight to their arguments, and that there is a real sense in the game that no one disputes that load management is an issue.
“There is a significant shift in the discourse,” Bielefeld said. “This is not sufficient. We need urgent action, but we are in a very different space than we were two-three years ago.”
“We will keep fighting for the best possible outcome on this issue and many other issues,” Alexander Phillips, FIFPRO’s secretary general said.
“But they all boil down to the same issue,” he said, “which is that the system is not working”
In the meantime, football’s schedule rolls on and the World Cup looms large. With 48 teams and 104 games, it will be the . Fans can only hope that next summer, the best players in the world will be fit and healthy enough to take part.
Edited by: Chuck Penfold
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