plays bruno once again
So many childish and straight up bad takes here (capitalism fault, environment, bla bla) What it boils down to is what average stress load can a footballer physically take and the lack of transparency what is expected in terms of a football club.
If they recognise, on average, that the amount of games exceeds the possibility for the average player, then a) they make it clear that clubs should structure around creating more squad depth to enable rotation and look at transfer policy in a more well-rounded squad than paying stupid money for the ideal 11. Or b) cut on games and competitions that aren’t necessary (league cup). The base problem is that clubs are over-paying on transfer and player salaries, which incentivises the need for more matches.
Clubs just need to get it out of their heads that they have to succumb to stupid transfer fees.
How is “capitalism’s fault” a childish excuse, it’s a genuine reason why there’s too many games, so the Premier League, UEFA, FIFA etc. can be greedy and make more money
That’s what capitalism is
A socialist system would also extort as many games as possible out of the players. If anything capitalist systems have proven to be far more responsive to overtaxing resources, whereas historically socialist systems are hesitant to reduce production of a good or service.
I don’t think a socialist system is the best solution either
A more moderate, less greedy capitalist system would be good, like making teams in Europe unable to participate in the League cup, and maybe reducing the teams in the Prem and have less games in pre season
Reducing the league cup games only delegitimises the competition. The better solution, objectively, is to reduce the number of european games played. Imo jt should be a straight knockout, no group stage games.
It isn’t. It’s overspending. Which has nothing to do with economic system. But straight up poor club management. You can set rules like budget or salary limit without a systematic change.
That’s why dying “capitalism bad” is a dumb and childish statement.
Faster pace and very high press too. Work rate to this gen player is insane.
Capitalist Stakeholders: Okay.
Ehh
Was this stretch from August to December different in 2013, 2003, 1993? Up until this point of the season, I’m failing to see what “extra” games there are.
UEFA will say we need more matches for the fans. 30 more extra PL games in Asia and America
“I love playing 12.30” Jürgen Klopp
it will reach to a certain point where clubs will purposely throw in the small cup and it turns into which team wanted to lose more.
He sent away the biggest player in football history, he received the biggest loss against their biggest rival, he destroyed the career of one of football biggest promises, he just lost against a random team from Denmark, once he gets sacked not only United, but football as a whole should feel relief
That’s why the big clubs invest in good substitute players as they need to be rotated. I may get it wrong, but it seems like he is trying to make excuses by blaming the schedule instead of his coaching skill.
Nothing shows the bias of this sub than when a united player/manager says the exact same thing as Liverpool/city/Chelsea.
“Just buy more players” is an absolutely terrible take on an issue pretty much everyone agrees is a problem
I agree with him 100%. It’s why most of the big clubs have bigger squads and players with some good versatility, so help cover multiple positions and allow others to rest. It’s hard on the smaller teams and those with less back up options in their squads. Brighton especially seem to be decimated with injuries whilst also having to factor in a European schedule.
Im surprised the most upvoted comments wasn’t a “Erik ten excuses” joke.
Chelsea have enough players to rotate for another 2 more competitions. Best club ITW /s
Europa has always been difficult for teams to handle. You often saw teams qualify and then next season be battling relegation. This isn’t a new phenomenon.
We had 4 different competitions AND a winter World Cup AND a messed up schedule due to the queen’s death last season, it was fucking absurd watching us playing every 3 days
This year should have been postponed like three weeks or so.
The thing is that the top teams in most leagues are rather stable and can plan on playing international football (and reaping the corresponding revenue and prize money) every season, so that they can afford to build large squads geared toward playing in 3/4 competitions. On the #6 or #7 spots, there is typically far higher volatility from year to year, so these clubs neither have the large squad, nor can they build one based on a one-off participation in international competition.
Newcastle had 10 squad members (and Elliot Anderson who’s u21 but a key squad member) out against Chelsea, we’ve got 2 games a week till Xmas.
Even with a decent 25 man squad we’re at bare bones, we named 4 keepers and mostly kids on our bench, and started a 17y/o…
There’s tough schedules and there’s ridiculous schedules. Next year’s changes to the champions league will add another burden for most clubs competing in that.
And then the double side of that is if you lose European football you can’t afford to expand your squad to much or have tonnes of players in a non Euro season who just won’t get enough football, so aside from teams who can stay in the top 3 regularly to build a massive squad, it just becomes a massive gamble on injuries.
That’s why I’m so grateful for Darmian. Without him we’d have been in the mud last year and even this year with Pavard going down and also Dumfries having no backup
As an Arsenal fan, I’m really grateful we have Trossard and Tomiyasu. Both can cover multiple positions and both are really talented footballers.
Timber was supposed to be that as well :(
Kai plays LB too
The bigger clubs usually had more matches. But with addition of conference league, the smaller clubs are beginning to feel the same pain
There’s always been 7-8 slots in Europe, and smaller clubs have always struggled with it. Stoke, Swansea, West Ham basically threw a qualifier one year to avoid it.
Oh yeah thats a good point. Here in the eredivisie, with recent coefficient points we have and the conference league, 8th place will already play europa games. Thats the half of the league where it used to be (on the top of my head) first champipns league play offs and second europa league play offs
It really hurts smaller teams.
We have so many out injured and we just dont have any depth to cover it up. We had 3 players on the bench yesterday that arent supposed to be close to the first team yet.
Yeah, if this keeps up it’s gonna become really important to have a versatile squad and bench. Having players who can only play one position is gonna be a luxury
Pep was way ahead of the curve on this one.
Didn’t help Wenger that much tbh, we were always crippled by injuries come Feb
Mostly because refs back then were totally cool with allowing teams to just kick them off the park
Claudio Ranieri was first manager I remember who really started rotating players in the Premiership. The British press nicknamed him the tinkerman because of it
I remember pundits completely losing it back then lol
“It’s disrespectful!” :D
Managers occasionally used to complain about CL clubs resting players and fielding weakened sides against their opposition.
The same managers then started resting their best players against Mourinho’s Chelsea to preserve their strength for matches they had a chance of winning, and everyone just kind of accepted that rotation is what we do now.
Emma Hayes has been building her Chelsea Women squad in this mould for years too. So many versatile players. Genuinely at least half of the squad can play at least three different positions.
Erin Cuthbert is her dream. Has played wing back on both flanks, defensive midfield, box-to-box, attacking midfield, both wings.
A lot is made of CFCW’s depth in terms of numbers, but it’s the versatility that is key - and Hayes has built it that way.
I mean the amount Injuries players are getting not just at United but other teams as well. Surely there is enough evidence out there footballers play too much.
But this is what capitalism does to a product, its squeezing as much money as they can out of product while the quality collapses.
They should just rotate more. It’s in their interest to avoid overworking the players too
They all know it’s a problem but hope to kick the can down the road and let someone else fix it.
Managers would happily risk ruining a player’s career by running him into the ground if it meant winning titles this season.
Going to get even worse with the expanded champions league and club World Cup too. All the PL teams in Europe, plus Chelsea and Tottenham are already so injury hit and we’ve not even got to the busy part of the season
Literally all of the major tournaments are getting bigger. Next Champions League is bigger, next Euros is bigger, next World Cup is bigger, next Club World Cup is bigger. This is only going to get worse for the players.
its squeezing as much money as they can out of product while the quality collapses.
Not really, there are better ways to make money from football than more games. Just look at american football. They play 17 games once a week. And its the most commercialised sport in the world.
There are ways to make stupid amounts of money without running the players into the ground.
But either way fans get fucked. Either through paying more for TV for more games or through a worse experience with mid game ads
NFL squads are literally 100 players.
Yeah the nfl has still fucked itself. They’ve added the 17th game which was a mistake, they add more Thursday games which are almost poor quality.
The concession is they’ve massively reduced practise time, which is lowering quality among the teams.
The rookie contract structure is almost massively hurting team quality, because teams overly rely on less experienced players, that aren’t able to gain experience in padded practice.
Theyre getting away with it because the American appetite for football is insatiable at the minute and they’re realised the same thing as the premier league. The games don’t have to be good.
A big part of the issue in football is that every federation is competing for a bigger piece of the pie. UEFA want more European games and FIFA want a bigger club world cup. Meanwhile CAF will always want AFCOn to run every 2 years as it’s their cash cow, and similar with other international federations.
Another advantage that NFL has is that all teams are at a more similar level, so more games feel big. This means that they’ll get good viewership if they’re spread out over the week, whereas I don’t think many people are excited to watch Wolves Vs Fulham on a Monday night.
I’m actually really surprised to see anti-capitalist sentiment on a subreddit as big as r/soccer.
I was thinking today about how we Manchester United fans complain about how bad our ownership is and how we have absolutely zero say over who gets to be in charge of the club we love.
Which got me wondering what a socialist ownership of a football club would look like. Usually it would mean complete employee ownership of the club meaning the staff would have a say in any decisions made, but for a football club, it’s just as important to invlove the fans.
I know the Bundesliga has the 50+1 rule but I view that more as a concession by the capitalists rather than an out-and-out socialist model of ownership.
I genuinely thought this sub was full of liberals so I’m glad I can get this thought out of my head without (hopefully) getting downvoted to fuck.
I kinda agree but the big clubs will adapt and they are the ones playing the most games, bigger squads with options to rotate players might be the solution. Man City is kinda doing that already at least when it comes to the back line and wingers. It won’t be easy though for a manager to know when to rest his best players.
You see the same in Formula 1 now, with drivers complaining that their bodies aren’t made for the amount of races.
It’s a bit ironical, considering how much we fans are against this concept, but a super league could actually be better for the players. With the clubs being owners of the league they’d be able to dictate how many games there would be. Right now they’re part of 3-4 different competitions that all want the teams to play as many games as possible for their competition.
I see it as more likely that instead of having less games we reduce the amount of matches each player takes part in.
So we for example set a cap of 50 games per player and they can’t play more than 6 times in a month.
Perhaps even limits on minutes for players returning from injury.
Eh only the best of best are playing too much. And they get compensated more, waaayyyy more than enough for that.
Not really trye, teams in league 2 for example play a shit ton of games every season.
When you have so many players getting injured, especially young players, there is no point talking about money, it could hinder football quality for a whole generation.
It’s not about compensation, but about the threshold of what the human body can endure. Players are getting injured so often they cannot catch a break to heal properly, because there is yet another game and their teammates are getting injured too, because they had to play more to cover for other injured players. Vicious circle.
only the best of best are playing too much
Every team in the Championship plays 48 games, every team in League 1 and League 2 plays 51 if they get knocked out of every cup at the first possible opportunity and don’t make the promotion playoffs.
I think this is one way managers such as Pep, Arteta & even Klopp partially have been ahead of the curve, by building squads where a single player can play multiple positions. This allows better coverage of injuries and better rotation. Still not sufficient but assuages the effect somewhat.
Manchester United have been too focussed on putting all the eggs into one basket with huge $$$ signings since Pogba and ETH is partially at fault, buying players like Mount who can just play in one position (which is already, more or less, taken by Fernandes) and average dosh like Anthony.
The environment, too. The planet is collapsing, but because it isn’t a televised sport, we don’t see it. Puts people being off being happy and buying things, if we saw what is happening and how rapidly it’s getting worse.
We can’t keep acting as though all that matters is more entertainment in our lives.
The entertainment being provided so we will buy lifestyles is not sustainable. We all know it.
Absolutely, some of the flights you hear about these teams taking are so pitifully short its mental.
How is this related to this post at all lmfao.
they are just saying the amount of plane rides teams do is bad for the planet too, is that really difficult to understand lol
Competitions = Money = Tax = Theoretically more ability to invest in green infrastructure.
A lot of emissions is a money issue. Europe for example is over the curve and reducing emissions. Unfortunately the rest of the world got richer and worldwide emissions keep going up.
However I hate this stupid argument. Because its a drop of water in an ocean. Honestly not worth the argument.
If it was only teams it would be okay. But for big clubs you have thousands of travelling fans as well
Hopefully, many of those travel by train or bus and don’t use planes but yeah, cars suck as well.
Football players have crossed the limits of what they can handle. We can see that because we watch them play.
The planet has also crossed the limits of what it can handle, but most people are trying to ignore it, and keep eating meat when they like, flying when they like, and consuming as much as they like.
Climate change pollution keeps rising, every year, despite all the green energy infrastructure that’s been built. People don’t see the collapse of our survivable environment, like they see footballers collapsing because they’ve been overplayed.
Like with Qatar and the Saudis taking over the World Cup, the next COP talks on how to deal with climate change have been taken over by the USE so that they can make sure we aren’t doing what we need to do and deal with their business model.
Thought I’d remind everyone that a more important situation is also passing what it can handle. If we don’t reduce consumption seriously, now, all the scientists are saying we face disaster.
If we don’t stop being ‘entertained’ by the expansion of consumption created by the money spent by oil states, we will be living on a planet that we can’t survive on.
Hope that’s explained it to you.
You’re way to pesismistic. Europe is geographically the least affected area by climate change. Its also the place reducing emissions the most. Ironically funded by european tax, which football contributes to.
Go speak to the rest of the world and not on a european football competition post. Because they are the ones that will suffer, and we’re the ones reducing emissions.
we will be living on a planet that we can’t survive on.
Not true in the slightest. Humans have suffered through far more dramatic climate shifts than even worst case models - whilst being significantly less technologically able. There is 0 risk we cannot survive on this planet in europe.
Now go back to watching football, might cheer you up. No point being depressed.
What?
Yup. The whole world can’t sustain our habits in the first world. Gotta be some sort of systemic comprehensive change otherwise our children will inherit an alien planet