Why players must take stand against game concerned only with bottom line

Times

28-05-2025

Milton Friedman, the American economist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize, said something that has always stayed with me. If you increase the amount of currency in an economy by, say, printing more notes, you don't thereby become wealthier. Instead, you devalue the coinage. It is a point that was also made by John Locke, David Hume and dozens of others who understand the basis of true wealth.
Football is devaluing its coinage. Fifa wants more matches, Uefa wants more matches, clubs want more matches, each in pursuit of the bottom line. They think they will become wealthier but the overall effect is a surfeit of games, coming thick and fast, all throughout the year, and often into what was once a sacrosanct summer break, such that it is not just the players who are exhausted and suffering from burnout and injury (look at the recent interviews with Phil Foden and Jude Bellingham) but increasingly the spectators, too.
Perhaps I am just speaking for myself here, but don't you feel it too? The World Cup has expanded (the 2026 incarnation will have three hundred teams playing over four months, or something like that), as has the Champions League, the Euros, the Nations League, just as the pre-season friendlies have morphed into ever more formats, in different parts of the world, stretching as far as Australia and Singapore.
And don't get me on this mad Club World Cup starting in June in the United States, featuring 32 teams, and which won't culminate until July 13. For sheer, grotesque excess only Monty Python's Mr Creosote (look it up on YouTube) comes close.
I know there have been plenty of dramatic moments this season, but my sense has been of competitions petering out. The spark has gone. The Inter Milan-Barcelona European semi-final was a thing of priceless, life-affirming magic, but how many other moments and matches are burnt on the retina? The players keep improving — physically and, above all, technically — but one gains the sense (corroborated by multiple interviews) that they always have half their minds on conserving themselves during the grind of the season, since they know that they can't keep producing their absolute best week in, week out, without something giving.
And things are giving more and more. Look at Rodri. Look at Kevin De Bruyne. Look at the growing injury lists. I read a paper in the British Medical Journal revealing that muscular microtears — which routinely accrue due to the intensity of the modern game — can take 72 hours to heal, perhaps longer. How on earth are top players supposed to ravish us with the precious currency of superlative performances when they are grinding through fifty to sixty games a season?
How can Barcelona's Lamine Yamal keep going after 12 months when the teams he represents have won the Euros, La Liga, the Copa del Rey, made a deep run in the Champions League and so much more? I remember reading somewhere that as a rule of thumb top players have 500 elite matches in their legs across a career. This precocious genius has already played 125 at the age of 17.
You'll say I'm whistling in the wind at the hope that football might rein it in. You'll say the commercial forces are just too strong. You're probably right. But can't we lament what might have been? A World Cup where we don't have dozens of meaningless matches. Continental competitions where each contest counts. Players gaining proper rest between matches so they can spark our collective imagination rather than spending an ever high proportion of their short careers on the physio's table. I'd suggest that a new approach would pay off commercially too.
When Foden was talking to reporters in the mixed zone after Manchester City's win over Bournemouth, he sounded utterly exhausted. 'It's frustrating for me because a lot of people don't know what football players have to go through and play with,' he said. 'I've had a lot of ankle pain and I've been playing with it the past couple of months.
'It came after I was tackled by Casemiro. I somehow managed to play on with my ligaments done. That's the kind of person I am… I missed the next game or two, came back to training maybe too early.' This is a 25-year-old with potentially a decade ahead, who seems to feel more like a hamster in a wheel than a top sportsman. Sure, he could stand up for himself, but football has become such a treadmill that few question it any more.
So let me offer a proposal for change. The players — the stars of the show, the people we all want to see — should lobby for a major reduction in the calendar and schedule. They should organise themselves. I am not an instinctive trade unionist (is anyone who grew up in the 1970s with its winter of discontent and insane militancy?), but on this occasion, I put aside my qualms. Footballers are extremely well paid, and I am not asking for sympathy on their behalf, but they are absolutely entitled to look after their health and viability, not to mention the integrity of the game they grace.
Cut down the overall quantity of matches (I'd say by a quarter at least) and football would instantly expand in our hearts and minds. The currency and creativity of the game would appreciate. That, at least, is the main lesson I take from an exhausting and anticlimactic season. It's time for change.