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.
The bigger clubs usually had more matches. But with addition of conference league, the smaller clubs are beginning to feel the same pain
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Kai plays LB too
Timber was supposed to be that as well :(
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
Other than reducing teams in the top flight from 20 to 18 (like in Germany and France) what else can be done? You can’t reduce the amount of CL games, cups are single leg only until later stages.
Clearly adding more games is incredibly stupid, but I don’t see how you can reduce them.
World cup in the middle of the year was horrific. Then they are even increasing the CL size now. Players are gonna get worn out pretty bad
I am all for 18 teams.
Btw, in Germany all cup games are single-leg. And there is only one national cup, like God intended. So there is still further room to reduce games in England, apart from the size of the league.
Just kick Chelsea and City out and it’s sorted.
Amen
Increasing squad size is the way. The governing bodies love money too much to play less games so having more players could go some way to alleviating the stress on players’ bodies.
Reducing number of games is the way. Bigger squads will only help the big clubs, whilst the likes of Brighton, Villa and West Ham (or any other team that gets European football) will not be able to keep up with the spend
Imagine City with an even bigger squad
I know r/soccer hates Newcastle but what’s happening to them at the moment is a poster for what’s wrong here (so are Brighton, and others, and indeed most clubs have big injury lists).
Club gets to the champions league spot for the 1st time in ages, spends basically the max allowed by FFP to try to increase the squad to cope but it’s nowhere near enough. Yesterday 10+ out after getting several back post international break. Their 25 man squad left the line up as including a 17 year old in the first 11, 3 goalkeepers on the bench, 4 kids with basically 0 prem mins and 2 semi-retired lads whose ages probably sum to 112.
If we’re not to change to less games, do away with injury time (by punishing harshly any time wasting perhaps?). Or could some forced rotation work - eg in baseball they often play 5 days in a row but have different pitchers each day. Could limit the number of starters who are allowed to play a mid-week game after playing 70+mins at the weekend.
Prem should make squad caps larger at the least if the schedule must be like this
My only worry with increasing the squad size is that it would make the league even more uneven, as the big clubs hoover up more talent.
oh so now he’s an advocate for player welfare…
Ty next
Rotate your squad. You have some guys starting 60 games and others starting 5. That’s on the managers. I know the pressure to win is massive but that’s a cultural issue not a scheduling issue.
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.
So why NBA players can do Back to Backs? 👀
(i am not even american)
Go look up how much the average distance an NBA player runs in a single game. Then look up how much the average distance an football player runs in a single game.
Soccer players run up to 3x the distance, do full sprints way more often, and have the added difficulty of dribbling/turning.
Because they’re different sports. During the Stanley Cup playoffs, you play every other day, even if the last game had 3-4-5 overtimes. MLB regularly does doubleheaders and any regular season game could go on until there’s a winner. Mention a 20 game regular season to NFL players (or try to increase to workload of pitchers) and you’re a dead man.
People here are all for agreeing about too many matches etc. but the next time a smaller team attempts to play defensively and “boring” against a bigger side it will all be calls for stop clocks and defending having 15 minutes added on at the end of games because “The ball was only in play X amount of minutes!”
The complete hypocritical attitudes that appeare from the same people depending on the thread title and what the sentiment is within the comment section when they arrive is very tiring.
“I love playing 12.30” Jürgen Klopp
100%. Doesn’t help that there is an international break every three weeks. It’s mental. Give them time to recover
Capitalist Stakeholders: Okay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You see the same in Formula 1 now, with drivers complaining that their bodies aren’t made for the amount of races.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
NFL squads are literally 100 players.
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.
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.
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.