According to a recent survey from FIFPRO, 54% of professional football players say they’ve suffered an injury due to schedule overload. There’s a good chance that number is about to rise, given that FIFA have forcefully wedged the 2022 World Cup in the middle of the European football season, throwing the major leagues into scheduling chaos and infringing on the already insufficient winter breaks.
Originally slated for the traditional June-July window, this quadrennial’s edition of the World Cup was shifted to November-December to escape the intense summer heat in host nation Qatar. While it’s allowed players to evade one problem, an entirely separate issue has emerged in the form of a completely stacked 2022/2023 football calendar. It’s no secret what that means for the players - 96.8% of them agree that match overload increases the chance of getting injured, and the historical injury numbers convincingly back them up.
Now we’re just days away from the first game. With growing fears of injury and overload, the consequences of FIFA’s Qatar experiment are already kicking in. So what’s the forecast?
Before the Cup
Rather than cut the total amount of games or finish the season later, the major European leagues have crammed their early season fixtures in order to vacate the calendar for the World Cup. With a 43-day gap in the EPL season, the preceding schedule has been relentless.
By November 14th last season, Tottenham had played 15 games across their EPL and European commitments, whereas this season that number is at 21. Since October 1st alone, they’ve played 10 games across all competitions, with an average of 2.42 days free between games to rest, recover, travel and somehow squeeze in some training.
But Tottenham’s medical room isn’t particularly full. In fact, a quick look at the general injury lists reveals that the casualty count is not alarmingly higher than a regular year. The players are, for the most part, handling the early season crunch just fine so far, supported by staff who are armed with the load-management lessons of COVID seasons gone by.
With domestic duties on ice for now, players have turned their attention to international obligations, with a key difference compared to previous years - across the last 8 editions of the World Cup, the average time between the final EPL game and the first game of the tournament was 31.9 days. This year, that gap has been slashed to just 7 days.
The consequences of the short turnaround are vast. For players who went down with injury in the last few weeks of club games like Reece James, it’s the difference between playing and sitting at home on the couch. For others like hamstrung Canadian speed demon Alphonso Davies, it means they’ll likely be rushed back, potentially leaving them underdone and at an increased injury risk both during the tournament and later in the season.
The slingshot straight into the World Cup also complicates things from an acclimatization point of view. England arrived in Doha on the 15th of November, and will play their first game on the 21st. With jetlag resolving at a rate of approximately one day per timezone crossed, England will have just five days to acclimatize to the Doha environment before they take on Iran. Sure, the stadiums in Qatar have revolutionary cooling technology which will purportedly place each stadium at around 20 degrees on matchday. But on the last EPL matchday, the thermometer peaked at 15 degrees, and England’s base in Qatar is situated at the uncovered and unair-conditioned Saoud bin Abdulrahman Stadium which sits at around 30 degrees even at 9pm. Science suggests that full acclimatization adaptations take around two weeks, and any teams tempted to ‘catch-up’ on the acclimatization conditioning in their 5-day mini training camps before kickoff risk overcooking their players for the first round of matchups.
So while those arriving from Europe might have a timezone advantage, those coming from warmer climates have an acclimatization advantage. All things considered, perhaps the best situated players are those arriving from Africa and the Middle East, where the timezone is within 0-3 hours of Doha, and the temperatures and humidity are similar.
During the Cup
Between travel, acclimatization, flip-flopping temperatures between venues, and the abrupt turnaround from the domestic season, rhythm will be hard to come by. As a result, don’t be surprised to see a higher frequency of upsets and inconsistent results, teams using their early games to find the rhythm and chemistry that’s usually refined during a typical pre-cup training camp, more load management than ever before, and, just maybe, a fair whack of injuries.
At the 2014 World Cup, a total of 104 injuries were officially reported by the 32 teams across training and matches, including 17 combined hamstring and quadricep strains. But while the circumstances of this year’s edition are certainly unique, they don’t guarantee a higher injury rate than previous. In fact, a silver lining of the mid-season World Cup is that the European-based players aren’t coming from 10 months straight of football like they usually would be, meaning they may be more capable of riding the fixture congestion wave for longer.
In Qatar, teams will typically have 3-4 days between games, which on the surface sounds manageable compared to recent domestic schedules. But the key thing is, we’re not comparing the schedules - we’re adding them together. For example, if England makes the World Cup final Harry Kane will have played 20 games in 79 days - that’s a game every 3.95 days over a near three month period. With long-term exposure to game loads like that, inevitably, some players are going to fall victim in Qatar, with those carrying existing risk factors such as a recent history of injury at an intensified risk. But it doesn’t end there - the show must go on.
After the cup
While the injuries prior to and during the World Cup aren’t guaranteed to be more frequent than a conventional year, the period after the trophy has been hoisted has the potential to be the most challenging of all. In 2018, there were 26 days between the World Cup final and the next EPL game. This year, there’s just 8 days between them. Even worse is that Manchester City and Liverpool are scheduled to meet in the EFL cup on December 22, just four days after the World Cup final. Given the evidence that injury burden is substantially higher in leagues that do not have a winter break compared with leagues that take time off, the outlook is especially bleak for players who go deep into the tournament and play in England.
Luckily, it’s not the same everywhere - the Serie A returns on January 4th despite their many Italian players spending December on vacation, and the Bundesliga has ambitiously set a return date of January 20. While that’s good news for schedule congestion, the challenge of reintegrating players into their club environments following the World Cup remains.
Players will return to their clubs from Qatar with wildly different load profiles and large disharmonies in rhythms based on how far their country advanced in the Cup, their role in the national team as a starter, substitute or unused bench player, and whether they even went to Qatar at all. This patchwork of recent loads ensures that there’s plenty of room for error as players reintegrate into domestic seasons. Adding fuel to the fire is FIRPRO’s finding that 73% of players report there is “not a high level of collaboration between their club and national teams when it comes to the management of load”.
The Verdict
Even as the Head of Sport Science for a European football team, it’s admittedly difficult for me to fully invest in being concerned about players having to face fixture congestion when the full context of this cup is considered. While the conditions are officially too hot to play football for a bunch of millionaires, they were apparently not too hot for migrant workers to be blatantly exploited for years, as compellingly outlined by former captain of the Finnish national team, Tim Sparv.
In typically tone-deaf fashion, FIFA has written to the 32 teams competing telling them to "now focus on the football" and not "hand out moral lessons". Accordingly, my proudest moment as a Socceroos fan may have already occurred off the pitch, when the squad posted a video condemning the human rights violations in Qatar.
Although many people won’t be tuning in, those involved are in for a wild ride. While there will undoubtedly be imminent victims of the crammed calendar, plenty of players will emerge relatively unscathed. But you can’t run from fixture congestion forever, and the consequences of Qatar will continue to be felt long after the final whistle.