General Discussion

I mean... it is the fans who are watching and attending those matches.

I seem to remember Sir Alex refusing to register Manchester United in the FA Cup because there were too many matches. I don't remember how it was resolved.

Money. Lots and lots of money. They all bath in it.

More matches more time to experiment with additional squad players and rest key players against lesser known teams, release them on loans and make MONEY save on wages.

Repeat.

Emi Martinez was a loan player most of his life and just had enough loan spells.

Emi Martinez loans spells.

The issue is that the managers and players only mention it as a problem when it affects THEM, and then when they don't get in trouble over it, they join the counter-choire of "it's not a problem for us, so they should just man up and kick on". Then the lack of memory beyond the last 3 months, and oh yeah MONEY. Also, the effect these excessive matches have on different clubs is very uneven. A club that goes all the way in cups will suffer greatly, where as a club that does not will usually just have a match a week and not give a damn...

It's never happening

money.

just look at the crazy amount of added time being added to each half. they only care about money.

do footballers have unions in different leagues?

As a fan, I don't think there are too many matches. It's kind of like being a manual laborer and complaining that working HARD 35 days per year is too much because of the other 150 days of light (ie practice) work you do on top of that.

At least footballers get paid an amount of money to make the effort worth it.

It's not that I don't believe them when they say it's too many games. However I still don't understand why teams don't simply ignore the league cup matches in their entirety and just send their u23s + their coaching staff to those games, while keeping their 20 to 25 core players + manager at home. Or even better: scheduling recovery/tactical sessions during league cup nights

Surely the FA will take notice when teams just say "fuck it" like that. Are there rules in place to prohibit this?

I can't speak for eveyone butnas a fan, I typically like watching my team so I don't want to see a reduction in fixtures. If anything I would like to see more but we keep losing games and our most prestigious trophy is the Watney Cup.

I mean Guardiola mooted that a player strike might happen on this issue about a month ago. It was certainly an issue in the last pfa election https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/59347490.amp

I suspect the problem is ultimately for competitive animals - which the top players are. Refusing the opportunity to play goes against their nature. All players are drilled to seek out and seize opportunities for first team football. You don’t make it out of the academy (and the majority of people don’t make it as pro footballers) to the first team if you don’t have an insanely professional mentality and strive to play every minute you can. A lot of players would fear being dropped permanently if they asked managers for rest or getting benched by a sub or rotation option impressing when called upon. Pep himself has said he has to rotate purely to keep players happy with their minutes. Zidane spoke about how difficult it was to convince Cristiano Ronaldo to sit on the bench even if it was obvious that as a guy in his mid 30s his career would be longer and better if he missed the odd game where he wasn’t needed like a copa del rey tie vs a 3rd division side or a UCL group stage dead rubber.

This factors into the other issue. It affects such a small proportion of the players. The vast majority of professional players play outside the top leagues and top divisions and therefore don’t play anything other than league and cup games and don’t get called up in international breaks. Even in the premier league the majority of teams don’t play European football, even amongst those who do play in Europe there’s no guarantee they go all the way to the final every year. Even on the teams who can guarantee that (basically just Man City) they have a deep bench and rotate - Haaland and Rodri are the only guys who play every game for their club and their country when fit. For the majority of players who the unions represent they want more game time not less. There are far more players in the situation of (picks random cb) James Tomkins who plays every now and then for Crystal Palace so is rarely playing midweek and always has the international breaks off than Virgil Van Dijk (in the same position) who plays pretty much every game as Liverpool captain regularly making deep runs in both cups and Europe every season so playing multiple midweek matches and captaining the Netherlands every international break and 2 summer tournaments in a row.

Most players have Tomkins match load not Van dijks

Messi will choke them if they try to riot

There would seem to be one obvious solution that I haven't heard people talking about.

More games means more money.

More money could mean more ability to pay players.

Solution - use the money to increase squad sizes, allow greater rotation of players to rest, ask football associations to increase the number of players that can be registered to play

Besides what was already said, if you are a team and go against the flow, everyone will judge you harshly. For example, we ALL know how shitty PGMOL and we complained non-stop, yet, when Liverpool made a statement, all non-Liverpool fans were against it.

That is why nobody is willing to do it, along with all the "losing money/sponsors" etc etc stuff.

If you really think they're going to protest, you're a bit delusional on that end.

Players and coaches will happily complain until their money gets affected. Them complaining means nothing since majority of them will never put their money where their mouth is.

I saw this comparison about the amount of games played by messi, xavi and iniesta by the time they were gavi’s age. And gavi played 80 more than messi, 100 games more than xavi and iniesta only played 15 games by this age.

This makes me think that maybe it’s also the coaches their fault for not letting these young players rest once in a while nowadays.

Because I only used players that played for barca. A team which always played the same competition, the same domestic cups. And always played champions league or europa league. These competitions haven’t changed in amount of games since then right?

Players have a union and their is a reason players don’t protest, it’s coz they actually don’t mind playing football.

It’s an excuse for managers.

I always think there isnt really a massive amount of difference between the amount of games.

Premier League season is still 38 games and has been since 95-96

Back then, a team starting the league cup from the 2nd round would play a 2 legged tie that round. I think there was replays in each round too.

FA Cup in the past you had replays in every round including the final.

Champions League...back in the day the finalists would play 6 games, two legged quarter finals and semi finals then the final. So 11 games. Now there's the round of 16 so an extra 2 games. However for a few seasons they had an extra group stage so in total the finalists would play 17 games.

World Cup/Euro qualification is pretty similar usually about 5/6 teams per group.

Teams would often play on the Saturday and then the following Monday.

In the 96-97 season, Man Utd and Middlesbrough played on the Saturday 3rd May, played each other on the Monday 5th. then both played I think on the Thursday, then the following Sunday. 4 games in 8 days.

They do.

Players (mostly with the club backing) would ask to be absent from meaningless international games with lots of travels (and often being scolded for it). And most clubs sent out heavily weakened teams for competitions which they dislike.

Klopp for example often sent out academy team for the domestic cup, and once sent out an U16 team in domestic cup, cause his main team has to play in CWC within 24 hours

oh i've wondered this for some time: do footballers work overtime?

Protest? The optics of multi millionaires protesting while some people can’t afford to eat in the same country would be insane.

They paid very well.

I don't see the issue at all for fans. Don't watch the lesser games if it bothers you. Teams can have a bigger squad to compensate for more games. Also players have longer careers with more matches than ever before.

Brother this people make millions of euros per year. A middle class person works at least 8 hours for 5 days and gets paid much less. So they shouldn't be pissed about it, and do their job.

IMO UEFA, FIFA etc. aren't even the problem.

The clubs are. They're the ones that pick the players in those matches. They could easily use more of their U21 players and rotate more (would probably be better for youth development for them to get more time in first team games too!) but they don't. They only use them when first team players are out injured and then whinge about it.

They are all under contract. If the leagues suffer monetary damages, they can sue all the players/clubs/managers responsible for said damages.

So if anyone were to take a stand against this, it would have to be the clubs (which they won’t cause that would mean less money).

I would have played match every day a week and twice on sunday for that money