Football season never ends: The Premier League is booming, but its clubs are feeling the strain

Time of India

2 days ago

If you did not follow this summer's expanded Club World Cup, you missed some decent games, a few upsets and a surprise win for Chelsea.
Independence Day 2025
Modi signals new push for tech independence with local chips
Before Trump, British used tariffs to kill Indian textile
Bank of Azad Hind: When Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose gave India its own currency
It was fine, and fine was good enough to ensure that the event will happen again in four years' time -- perhaps sooner. And that means you also possibly missed the beginning of the end of soccer as most of us know it.
With the new
Premier League
season starting this weekend, many of the world's best players will embark on an 11-month season that will finish at next summer's World Cup, the old-fashioned one but with 48 teams and 104 games, not 32 teams and 64 games, as in recent editions.
This is less than five weeks after Chelsea beat Paris Saint-Germain in the Club World Cup final in New York, but only two weeks after
Manchester United
drew with Everton to clinch the Premier League's very own American showcase event, the Summer Series.
It is not just the world's best players who are now locked into an endless content-creation cycle. The first round of Champions League qualifying took place on July 8, the same day Chelsea beat Fluminense in the semifinal of the Club World Cup, a tournament that neither brought the curtain down on 2024-25 nor raised it for 2025-26.
Live Events
There is no curtain anymore.
The lower leagues in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and elsewhere in northern Europe were always early starters, but England's Leagues One and Two began their new campaigns on Aug. 1.
In fact, League Two's Barnet and Newport County had already played each other in an EFL Cup preliminary round on July 29 -- in other words, before most of their fans had gone on their summer holidays, let alone taken some time off to enjoy the cricket season, a music festival, a summer fete, anything other than soccer, basically.
The English Football League had no choice but to start so early, as it was the only way to ensure there was room in the schedule to include the record nine Premier League teams that have qualified for European soccer this season when they join the competition in the third round.
What else could the EFL do when
UEFA
added a third European competition, the Conference League, in 2021, and then expanded all three of its club competitions in 2024, adding extra games and teams? The Champions League leaped from 125 to 189 games last season; once that happened, every new edition of the EFL Cup is a minor miracle.
The EFL could just stop scheduling it, but Premier League clubs appear to like winning it, as do their fans. Newcastle United's certainly did.
It also makes up a big chunk of the EFL's broadcast revenues, and the Premier League's participation in the competition is one of the least painful contributions the top flight makes to the rest of the professional pyramid.
Take that away, and Premier League boss Richard
Masters
would have an even harder time trying to persuade his shareholders to send more money down the pipe before the new independent football regulator makes them.
But that is not his only headache.
Masters has been talking for several years now about the fact that the Premier League has been the same size and shape for more than three decades: 20 teams, 380 games.
He was at it again earlier this month, when the BBC asked him why the Premier League does not just shrink to 18 teams. After all, that was the original idea back in 1992, when the
Football Association
encouraged the top clubs to break away from the EFL, its ancient rival, and form the Premier League. The clubs were only half-listening, though, and having cut the top division from 22 teams to 20 decided to stop there.
"I don't think we should be forced into that decision," Masters said. "I am all for the growth of the game and the exciting competitions our clubs can participate in, but not at the expense of domestic football."
FIFA
and UEFA have been dropping not-so-subtle hints that 18-team leagues, with a maximum of 306 games, is where everyone should have arrived by now. They have shown the big clubs the value of international competition, and the clubs want more of it, which means less time for domestic chores.
Would England's aristocrats vote to cut the Premier League?
Maybe, maybe not. Unlike their European peers, they can still see the benefit of domestic soccer in their profit and loss accounts, as the Premier League, for a variety of reasons, has become the closest thing to a
European Super League
since the Big Six briefly conspired with Barcelona,
Juventus
,
Real Madrid
and Co. to create a more regular and lucrative place to get together than the Champions League.
That abomination collapsed inside 72 hours, but instead of being punished for their treachery, the big clubs were rewarded with an expanded Champions League and a revamped Club World Cup.
With the Premier League's overseas media rights still rising in value, its stadiums full (and growing) and almost half its clubs playing in Europe this season, the status quo looks pretty good right now.
But Masters can see the writing on the wall.
Entirely fed up with FIFA grabbing bigger chunks of the calendar, the Premier League has teamed up with Europe's other domestic leagues and the Continent's players' unions to lodge a formal complaint against the global governing body at the European Commission.
By bringing
European Union
competition law into soccer's fixture squabbles, the leagues and players are telling FIFA that they believe the game has reached a saturation point, the players are exhausted, and there are no more cup replays to scrap.
To be honest, questions could be asked as to why the leagues and players did not combine to resist UEFA's expansionism, but the European confederation at least invites representatives from the leagues and unions to its meetings before telling them it is going to create new competitions, grab more exclusive midweek slots, and maybe pinch a weekend or two.
The Premier League knows it cannot get too argumentative with an organization that provides at least a third of its shareholders with large checks each season, not to mention the fact that the race for European berths is a vital part of the Premier League's annual narrative.
FIFA, on the other hand, consults via news release and photo opportunity, as FIFPro, the global players' union, has been pointing out of late. And, unlike UEFA, its president, Gianni Infantino, is not trying to defend a dominant position; he is attempting to disrupt it, globalize it and own it. He took a step toward that with the Club World Cup.
"Since 1994, the Premier League has been 380 matches, 20 clubs," Masters told the BBC. "We haven't changed shape at all. Now we are starting to redesign our domestic calendar at the altar of European and global expansion.
"We are asking the players to play in more matches. There has to be, at the top of the game, a proper dialogue between FIFA and all the stakeholders about how these things go forward. That has been sadly missing."
Yep, and now the only dialogue is going to be a row about whether the Club World Cup should go to 48 teams in 2029, with more spots for Masters' shareholders, or maybe we should just let FIFA do it every two years, floating from summer to winter as it crosses the globe.
If that happens, and there is no question that FIFA wants that to happen -- ideally in rotation with a biennial men's World Cup -- we can forget 18-team domestic top flights, with deep professional pyramids and historic national cup competitions. We will be lucky to find time for a 16-team domestic league, and when that happens, we will all realize that fixture congestion was never just a problem for a handful of stars.
So, enjoy this season. Cherish it, even. Because there might not be many like it left.