Fixture congestion is getting ridiculous

T

TopScorer88

Community Member
Joined
Feb 28, 2025
FIFPRO sounding the alarm about Arsenal players potentially hitting over 80 games in a season feels like the point where everyone can finally admit this has gone too far. The calendar is absolutely stuffed and it’s not just the matches themselves, it’s the travel, training and constant recovery cycle on top of it all. Players are being asked to do the impossible week after week.

What makes it worse is that the people running the game always seem to answer congestion with even more competitions, more formats and more money. You can already see squads being stretched, quality dropping and injuries piling up. At some stage the players or their unions are going to have to force the issue because the organisers clearly won’t stop on their own.

Arsenal are the headline here, but this is bigger than one club. If top players are being pushed towards 70, 80, even 100 games a season, the sport is going to suffer for it. The football gets worse, the entertainment gets worse and the fans end up paying for it too.
 
People keep acting like this is just some rich club problem but it is not, if Arsenal lads are touching 80 games then the whole sport is cooked and the same idiots who want more tournaments and more revenue are the ones making it happen, and yeah sure they get paid well but that does not magically make your body recover quicker, it just means you are paid to get wrecked for everyone else's entertainment and then blamed when the level drops
 
The schedule is completely out of control, and everyone knows it. Players cannot keep giving max effort every few days forever.
 
I dont even think people realise how insane this is until you actually sit down and count it and then remember that its not just the matches its the travel the recovery the training the constant need to be ready every 3 or 4 days and the fact that every club wants their own piece of the pie, fifa uefa broadcasters sponsors all of them just keep squeezing and then act shocked when players break down or the football looks flat, like what do they expect, lads are not machines and if a top side is genuinely looking at 80 games for multiple players then the calendar is beyond stupid and the only answer is less competitions, less pointless trips, less nonsense and more actual rest because otherwise the product gets worse and worse and nobody in charge seems bothered until the injuries start piling up
 
On paper this is exactly what you would expect once the calendar keeps expanding and nobody actually removes anything, because every new competition or format adds load to the same small group of elite players while the commercial side just keeps celebrating more content and more revenue. The issue is not only the number of fixtures, it is the compounding effect of travel, intensity, recovery windows and the fact that managers are still expected to play high pressing football with squads that are running on fumes. And yet every time this comes up the answer from the people in charge is always some version of "manage it better" or "rotate more" as if that fixes structural overload. It does not. At some point you are just asking for injuries and worse football, and honestly the whole thing is getting ridiculous
 
The tactical knock-on is obvious as well. If squads are expected to handle this workload, managers will have to lower pressing intensity and accept more rotation, otherwise the quality drops off a cliff. You cannot demand relentless tempo from players who are already stretched that thin.
 
Honestly this just makes me feel tired watching it all and we are not even the ones playing every three days, imagine being in that squad and having to keep turning up when your legs are gone and the schedule never stops, it must be brutal
 
I do not know why people keep acting surprised when one player gets mentioned in these conversations because the whole point is that the workload is shared across the same core group and then one of them ends up carrying way too much for too long and everyone suddenly acts like it came out of nowhere, the clubs keep saying they need depth but then still run the same lads into the ground because every competition matters when the money is on the line and then the same player is expected to be fresh again in a few days like he is some sort of robot and not a human being with knees and ankles and all the rest of it, it is not sustainable and it never was
 
The problem is less about one club and more about the overall direction of the sport. The calendar keeps expanding without anything being removed.
 
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