Does the football season ever really end?

New York Times

2 days ago

'Let's hear it for the boys — make some noise!' cries the voice over the public address system at Park Hall Stadium on a beautiful summer evening.
It's July 8, in Oswestry, an English market town that's only three miles from the Welsh border and where the whistle has just sounded to start a Champions League first qualifying round first-leg tie between The New Saints (TNS), the Cymru Premier title winners, and KF Shkendija of North Macedonia.
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Typically, the kick-off in these early Champions League fixtures is regarded as the curtain-raiser to the new season and a sign that club football is finally back.
Except club football never went away this summer.
At the same time as TNS and KF Shkendija were playing out a goalless draw in Shropshire, Chelsea were taking on Fluminense in the Club World Cup semi-final at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, chasing silverware and nearly £100million (about $136m) in prize money in their 63rd game of the 2024-25 season.
When Enzo Maresca flagged that statistic at his pre-match press conference, a journalist was quick to point out to the Chelsea manager that Fluminense had played 70 games in the same period (albeit across two different seasons).
Is there a who-played-the-most-games trophy?
If so, Real Madrid would be firmly in the mix, too. Their Club World Cup semi-final defeat to Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday night was the 68th and final game of their season.
Concerned that the break between seasons this summer is too short for their players, Real Madrid have asked La Liga if their opening game of the 2025-26 campaign, against Osasuna, can be pushed back to a later date.
As for PSG, it says everything that the Champions League winners were happy to allow two of their players, Lucas Hernandez and Willian Pacho, to leave the squad before the Club World Cup semi-final and escape for a holiday because suspension ruled them out of the rest of the tournament. Take a break as soon as you can is the message now, even if that means missing out on a potential trophy celebration.
Eat.
Sleep.
Football.
Repeat.
It's a never-ending cycle of matches at the highest level these days and the players are getting increasingly fed up with it.
'There are teams whose season started mid-July 2024… it's July 4, 2025, and they're still playing,' Jules Kounde, the Barcelona and France defender who ranks among the top 20 footballers for minutes played during the 2024-25 season, posted on social media last Friday.
'A season longer than a year,' Raphael Varane, Kounde's former France team-mate, added later in the day. 'More competitions, more games, more injuries. Less care for players. Still no response from those in charge…'
A penny for the thoughts of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president and a man who has never subscribed to the view that less might sometimes be more when it comes to football.
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Under Infantino, FIFA's Club World Cup, which not so long ago involved seven teams and was played over 10 days, has been expanded to a 32-team tournament that lasts just under a month. Next summer, the World Cup will be played over close to six weeks, feature 48 teams for the first time, deliver a total of 104 matches, and includes a new last-32 knockout stage that means, after 17 days of football across three countries, we'll be back to where we were with the number of nations who were competing in the previous edition on day one.
It's not just FIFA, though. The revamped Champions League format introduced by UEFA in the 2024-25 season has increased the number of matches from 125 to 189 — two extra for every club competing in what was previously the group stage but is now a 36-team league phase.
Money, of course, talks the loudest here and there is an argument that the players, not just the clubs and the stakeholders, are the beneficiaries of that extra income.
But footballers aren't machines and the concern is that there comes a point when all of this becomes unsustainable and that the game itself starts to suffer.
Some of the individual player numbers around minutes and appearances are astonishing to people who are experts across elite sport and high performance — and not astonishing in a good way.
Against Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid's Federico Valverde — a man for all seasons if ever there was one — stretched his advantage over Manchester United's Bruno Fernandes at the top of the leaderboard for minutes played in the current campaign.
According to a combination of the 'workload' data available via FIFPRO, the union which represents more than 70,000 players worldwide, and The Athletic's own research, Valverde has completed 6,674 minutes of competitive football for club and country (that figure includes added time in matches) since Real Madrid's Super Cup final against Atalanta on August 14 last year.
That's the equivalent of 74 90-minute matches in less than 11 months. Or, to put it another way, four days and 14 and a half hours of a non-stop footballathon (please don't get any ideas, Gianni).
Valverde's previous season ended in July last year, when Uruguay reached the semi-finals of the Copa America. This one (2024-25) ended in New York last night (July 9). The coming season (2025-26) runs until Sunday July 19, in New Jersey, with the World Cup final.
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Julian Alvarez will hope to be there with Argentina, just like he has been pretty much everywhere else with club and country over the last couple of years.
FIFPRO's research found that the Atletico Madrid striker was included in 83 matchday squads in 2023-24, when he made 75 appearances for Manchester City and Argentina. This season he has played 67 games, with Atletico's early elimination from the Club World Cup something of a blessing for a man who had 17 days between his final fixture of the 2023-24 campaign, at the Olympics in Paris, and his first match of 2024-25, for Atletico against Villarreal.
It's only natural to focus on the physical demands of playing so regularly, and to shine a light on the appearances that players such as Fabian Ruiz and Pedri have made on the back of a long season that finished with Euro 2024 glory with Spain last July, but there is mental exhaustion too and that, of course, is impossible to measure.
Last week the Professional Footballers' Association's chief executive Maheta Molango said that players taking part in the Club World Cup this summer 'will be struggling to know which season they are in' and suggested that the coming campaign could end up being the breaking point in terms of fatigue, injuries and loss of form.
'It's almost as if the lines are blurred between seasons — this is our problem,' Molango added.
'We're not trying to single out a specific competition. It's this feeling of accumulation of competitions that just do not talk to each other and create a calendar that's just nonsensical.
'I think (Manchester City head coach) Pep Guardiola said the other day, and we agree, let's see what happens in October, November — that's when you're going to start seeing (the impact), because you pay the price.'
Some of the player data at either end of the age scale jumps off the page. Lamine Yamal, for example, played 5,575 minutes for Barcelona and Spain this season, at the age of 17, having made 64 appearances for club and country the season before.
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Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that the player who has made the most appearances during the 2024-25 season turns 40 in September. Luka Modric has been named in 76 matchday squads for Real Madrid and Croatia since August and, incredibly, featured in 73 of those fixtures, starting just under half of those games and playing, on average, close to 60 minutes per appearance.
Generally, supporters aren't that sympathetic to players at the highest level complaining about the idea that they're being made to play too much football (as some of the replies to Kounde's post on social media illustrated), largely because of their wages.
Indeed, it feels as though there is just an acceptance that football never stops now and that the sort of minutes being posted on that leaderboard are merely reflective of the modern game.
Darren Burgess, who is the chairperson for FIFPRO's high-performance network and previously worked for Arsenal and Liverpool, nods in agreement.
'Your example of Valverde is quite extraordinary,' he says. 'Some of our future forecasts suggest that players could play around 80 games (a season), so Valverde is certainly in that ballpark.
'It has almost become normalised. And the expectation now, based on your question to me around the fans' feelings, is: 'These players are paid good money, they should be playing. I work 11 months of the year. So should they.' So I think there is a perception around that.
'But, fortunately, with quotes like Kounde's, the players are now speaking up and fans are getting a little bit more educated as to the consequences of this increasing match and minutes exposure, and they will realise that the quality of the product is going to deteriorate. I think we've seen that with a couple of the more recent summer tournaments. Even objectively, some of the sprint numbers that the players are performing in those tournaments have decreased, so we're not just seeing this from a subjective point of view.'
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With so many competing interests, huge money at stake and nobody wanting to take a smaller slice of the cake, it's hard to see a resolution, even if there is a clear plan as to what should happen in an ideal world.
Last month, FIFPRO called for the introduction of a mandatory four-week off-season break to safeguard against excessive workloads, after publishing the results of an independent study that involved 70 performance and medical experts. Twelve recommendations were put forward, including another four-week period of retraining before a new season starts – all of which is, clearly, impossible with the current match calendar.
Back at TNS, the mood is rather different. A busy schedule, and the opportunity to compete in European football again, is a welcome by-product of the Welsh team's domestic success.
'It's an 11-and-a-half month season for us,' Craig Harrison, the TNS manager, says. 'We've been back in training for six weeks leading up to this game, so we were actually training when the Premier League was still happening.'
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Nurphoto / Getty, Visionhaus / Getty, Robbie Jay Barratt / Getty)