The injury suffered by Manchester City midfielder Rodri in his side’s 2-2 draw against Arsenal has overblown the debate on the negative impacts of the fixture congestion for top European clubs.
It’s also telling that Rodri’s injury happened a meager few days after he complained about top players (like himself) having to play over 60 matches per season due to the crazy schedule. He pointed at the expanded UEFA Champions League format that makes teams play more games and other cup competitions. There is also the FIFA Club World Cup to consider from 2025.
Rodri hinted that players might go on strike if this crazy congestion isn’t stopped, only to get injured days later. But his knee injury, which was seemingly a non-contact one, has sparked lots of opinions to emerge about the crazy fixture schedule.
The biggest bit of virtue-signalling on this matter has been done through an article released by The Athletic, written by journalist Tim Spiers. In his in-depth article, he details the causes for the fixture congestion and the many different parties responsible for creating this schedule where top-level footballers have to play competitive games multiple times a week.
But the article surprisingly took aim at the football fans themselves for being responsible for bringing upon these problems.
In an excerpt, Spiers wrote: “And we, the media, or fans, we’re all complicit in that we just keep gobbling all the football up in our metaphorical goal mouths. We pay Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Amazon, CBS and whoever else to watch the games, we incessantly scour social media for football content, or play fantasy football, or download club apps.”
This rather strange opinion has not gone down well with most football fans at all. Fans have comopletely rejected this baseless claim because there isn’t really any proof that the different fanbases had any say about how the European domestic fixture schedule is created.
A lot of different supporters have decided to set the record straight by compiling the facts about who is really responsible for this mess. The newly-designed FIFA Club World Cup, that begins next year, has been pointed at something that the majority of different clubs’ fans asked for.
The Club World Cup will happen from June 15 to July 13, which is basically the vacation period for footballers.
The decision to hold the competition in that period is strictly one made by FIFA, because no fan really forced them to bring about an off-season tournament like this.
It’s basically been done to rake in more money from broadcast or commercial revenue for FIFA’s profits than delighting fans, most of whom will anyhow be exhausted in the period after the end of the long 2024/25 season.
Fans have also pointed at the absolutely unnecessary ‘expansion’ of the Champions League to 36 teams and every team playing eight games in the new ‘league stages’.
Before this happened, there weren’t really any petition from fans to bring about this. In fact, this format is eerily similar to the European Super League’s structure, a competition football supporters vehemently protested against.
The total prize distribution purse for the 2024/25 Champions League from UEFA this season will reportedly be £2.07 billion, an increase from £1.74 billion last season. The Federation itself will also bag a major profit because of the huge return in broadcast revenue from around the globe.
It’s clear that this ‘expansion’ was just done to fill UEFA’s pockets with more money than the well-being of footballers or fans. Fans are also accusing The Athletic of trying to try to circulate a personal agenda with this strange take on the fixture congestion issue by blaming fans.
At the end of the day, the football fans are the heart and soul of the sport as it’s their hard-earned money that helps fill the pockets of players and clubs. So throwing baseless accusations at them for a fixture congestion mess that nobody wanted is something The Athletic should really refrain from doing.
