Why are football's player unions so powerless compared with U.S. sports?

New York Times

2 days ago

FIFA president Gianni Infantino spent much of the summer strolling around the U.S. at the Club World Cup, usually either following President Donald Trump or being followed by a group of football legends ready to declare how brilliant his latest idea is.
But as players wilted in the heat and games were delayed by extreme weather conditions, some were keen to offer an alternative view.
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'What was presented as a global festival of football,' said a statement by Sergio Marchi, the president of global players' union FIFPro, 'was nothing more than a fiction staged by FIFA, driven by its president, without dialogue, without sensitivity and without respect for those who sustain the game with their daily efforts.'
Punchy.
Marchi went on to refer to the tournament as a 'grandiloquent staging that inevitably recalls the 'bread and circuses' of Nero's Rome' and said the 'inequality, precariousness and lack of protection of the real protagonists deepens'.
The language may have been a little florid, but Marchi's statement served a purpose. This tournament was the latest and perhaps most trumpeted example of something FIFPro has been talking about for years: the crowded international football calendar and the increasing demands being placed on footballers.
It's the sort of thing you would expect a players' union to be vocal about, and ideally change. The problem is, their efforts to get the global football authorities to do anything tangible have been frustrated.
And not for the first time. Which raises the question: why is it so hard for FIFPro, and other player unions, to gain traction in football?
'FIFA's governance model allows them to do whatever they want,' Alex Phillips, FIFPro's secretary general, tells The Athletic.
'They're a law unto themselves. It's not just FIFA: this happens on a national level, and we see this quite a lot where the federation or the league don't like what the union is saying because they're challenging their power.'
A perfect illustration of this came after Marchi's statement and the farcical situation where Infantino held a meeting to discuss the calendar issue, with some representatives from players' unions present, but not FIFPro.
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Apparent union members from Brazil, Spain, Ukraine, Mexico, Switzerland, Ivory Coast, Latvia, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic were all present instead. FIFPro had been involved in some lower-level discussions about the football calendar, but were not invited to this more high-profile discussion.
After that meeting, FIFA announced a consensus had been reached, that players must have at least 72 hours of rest between matches and there should be at least 21 days of rest at the end of each season. Which is fine (even though FIFPro says it should be at least 28 days at the end of each season), but the FIFA press release went on to say these stipulations 'should be managed individually by each club and the respective players'.
Why were FIFPro left out of a meeting like this? According to Marchi, the man at the top is the problem.
'The biggest obstacle is the autocracy of the FIFA president, who doesn't listen — he lives in his own world,' Marchi told The Athletic this week.
'He believes that only the big spectacles are the ones that bring importance. And we feel that he's not listening to the voices of all the football players, to the needs of the players. It's great that we have a World Cup, a Club World Cup, or any world championship because it's a wonderful celebration, but that celebration wasn't created by him. It was created by the players and the spectators, the fans.
'He's simply a manager, not the owner of it. But that's not the most important thing. What's important are all the players around the world, and I've clearly told him this — I've said it to his face.'
A FIFA statement on Friday read: 'FIFA is extremely disappointed by the increasingly divisive and contradictory tone adopted by FIFPro leadership as this approach clearly shows that, rather than engaging in constructive dialogue, FIFPro has chosen to pursue a path of public confrontation driven by artificial PR battles — which have nothing to do with protecting the welfare of professional players, but rather aim to preserve their own personal positions and interests.
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'The global football community deserves better. Players deserve better.'
The statement discussed the summit, stating they had made 'unsuccessful efforts to bring FIFPro to the table in an environment of non-hostility and respectful, progressive dialogue'.
It also said FIFA are looking to introduce measures whereby players and player unions are represented in FIFA's standing committees and the possibility of them participating in FIFA Council meetings when players' matters are being addressed.
FIFA sources, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, also said that the world governing body 'made a genuine effort to engage' with Marchi and FIFPro's new leadership when welcoming them to FIFA headquarters in Zurich in January of this year.
For anyone used to observing how unions work in American sports, all of this would seem very strange.
In America, most sports literally cannot go ahead without a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) being reached, something negotiated between the league and the players' unions. In baseball, there are already strong fears that the 2027 season will be disrupted and the players could go on strike, largely because of anticipated differences between the parties over salary caps in the next CBA negotiations, which have been desired by the clubs for some time but are the ultimate line in the sand for players.
The 1994 season was curtailed (the World Series didn't take place) and the start of the 1995 season was delayed because of a dispute involving salary caps, which has echoes in the anticipated issues for 2027.
It's happened in other sports, too. The 2004-05 NHL season was cancelled over a similar disagreement related to salary caps, while the start of the 2011-12 NBA season was delayed due to disputes over the sport's CBA. The NFL also suffered a player lockout in 2011 over a variety of issues, although that was confined to the off-season and no actual games were lost.
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The point is that in those cases, the players' unions had the power to bring the whole sport to a halt. In football, those at the top of the sport can afford to ignore them.
One of the main reasons for this is those big U.S. sports are closed markets, operating in a single country. There are places other than America for baseball or basketball or hockey, but the elite level is so far above everything else that it's essentially the only place to play. In football, it's very different: a player can go almost anywhere they want, which is broadly a positive, but reduces leverage when it comes to disputes with the governing powers.
'We need to keep in mind that we're in an open market here, unlike the U.S.,' says Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association in the UK.
'This is the problem we have, in comparison to U.S. sports — multiple stakeholders that all utilise the same assets. By which I mean players — and I use the word assets on purpose because that's how the players are treated.
'You don't have multiple stakeholders in U.S. sports, you just have the leagues. We have many: the leagues, the confederations and then the international bodies. All of them use the same assets.'
And in the case of the crammed international calendar, those stakeholders keep adding games and further commitments for the players. So you'll have UEFA adding extra games to the Champions League, or creating a new competition such as the Conference League, while FIFA is conjuring the Club World Cup out of thin air, or adding more teams (and thus more games) to the proper World Cup.
Throw in clubs shoehorning pre- and post-season tours into the schedule whenever they can, and it becomes like multiple children adding items on to the Buckaroo! mule, with little care given to anything around them. The unions' job — to do its best to stop the mule from chucking everything up in the air — thus becomes pretty tricky.
'They all have their own calendar, which make sense when you look at them individually, but they don't make any sense when you look at them holistically because they don't talk to each other,' adds Molango.
We should make clear that the unions are busy with other things as well. Phillips cites an issue raised by The Athletic recently, about the number of former players going bankrupt, which is something unions help with, along with other post-career services. When a player lower down the food chain is in dispute with their club, unions step in there, too.
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But on the biggest issue of the day, the international calendar, the unions have comparatively little leverage. And perhaps the biggest single reason is that wide-scale industrial action is incredibly difficult.
Industrial action from players has been mentioned in passing, as vague threats around certain issues. In September 2024, Rodri said that strikes were 'close' in protest against the overwhelming international calendar, and that players will have 'no other option' if more games keep being added.
That was particularly notable because he was speaking a few days before he was ruled out for the remainder of the season after damaging ligaments in his knee: it can't be definitively proven that this was a consequence of him playing 67 games for club and country over the preceding year, but such a workload can't have helped.
But no large-scale, international strikes have materialised, partly because it's incredibly difficult. You have to negotiate the different labour laws in different countries, for a start. That's enough to give any lawyer a headache.
Getting enough players to align behind an individual issue is tough, and you need either a massive weight of numbers or some high-profile players to sign up to the cause in order to make the relevant authority sit up. Will anyone in the latter group be willing to risk their own positions, risk their own money, essentially, for something that might not really impact them?
The scale of the game is another problem. It's possible to take industrial action on individual, national levels — Colombian players, for example, voted to strike earlier this year — but on an international scale, which is the sort of level that you would need to really make FIFA jump, is impractical.
On a technical level, FIFPro also can't organise a strike. 'We don't have players as members,' says Phillips, 'so we can't call players and say go on strike because our members are national player unions and national player associations.'
In any case, conversations with those involved in the unions suggest there really isn't the appetite to treat strikes as anything other than a final, final step. 'No worker wants to stop working and not get paid,' says Phillips, 'so it's a final resort when negotiations fail.'
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There perhaps lies one area where the unions could be doing more. Conversations with players past and present, kept anonymous to allow them to protect relationships, suggested that most weren't unhappy with the work their unions did, but felt they could be more proactive, more confrontational, even, with the authorities.
Still, the impetus doesn't have to come from the unions. 'It's no longer the unions calling for potential strikes; it's the players themselves,' says Molango.
'The number of issues that could lead to strikes are limited, however those are issues that are so easy for players to feel the consequences of that you shouldn't discount anything. When you've had players who have suffered an ACL or have mental wellbeing issues because they have played too much, it's no longer you convincing them of the need for action. It's them saying we need to protect ourselves.'
Marchi, who, as we've established, is not shy about talking a good game, will perhaps help the perception that the unions are too soft. But ultimately influence, without resorting to strike action, is what the unions are there for — and what FIFPro is looking for.
'We have a good relationship with FIFA on an operational level in most departments, but we don't have any decision-making power,' says Phillips. 'And that's what we're fighting for — to have a say at the top table, on issues that directly affect players' rights. To have a veto so that we would negotiate those rights, as happens on a national level, together with the clubs.
'We need a change in the decision-making process, and U.S. sports are way ahead of us on that because the players have an equal say on the big issues that affect professional players.'
Will they get that? It's hard to see it happening any time soon.