Saturated schedules harm fans as well as players, footballers' union boss says
The boss of an English football’s players’ union has said strike action by the Premier League’s superstars is a real possibility.
Speaking exclusively to ITV News, Maheta Molango, who runs the Professional Footballers Association (PFA), said: “I think there is nothing that can be discarded. What you've heard from the players is what we're hearing ourselves when we go to dressing rooms.”
Any industrial action would be directed at international fixtures, not the domestic leagues.
Molango says the schedule is now “saturated” and, as a result, it’s not just the players who are affected - fans are cheated too.
”They see that the players, who are their heroes, do not perform at the level they should be performing, or, even worse, get injured," he said.
"And when this happens, people say, ‘I pay 100% of my ticket, but I only get 60% of the performance’ and that's not right.”
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He has just returned from Brussels, where the PFA joined forces with other unions and Europe’s leagues in legal action against Fifa over its expanding football calendar.
Specifically, Fifa is accused of a conflict of interest given it is acting as both competition organiser and governing body - which lawyers say flies in the face of European competition law.
The lawsuit highlights the expanded World Cup and Fifa’s new 32 team Club World Cup as unacceptable growth that is having a direct impact on players welfare.
Molango’s comments come as a new study from insurance specialists Howden seems to back his claims.
The annual report reveals injuries across Europe’s top five leagues last season rose by four per cent, costing clubs a total of seven hundred and €32 million (£26.6 million).
The Premier League accounts for a staggering 44% of those costs; largely because salaries in England are greater than elsewhere.
Only two clubs in the top flight have suffered injuries below the European average. Premier League footballers play more matches than their European counterparts and each club suffers an injury, on average, every 94 minutes.
The study shows that only the Premier League has registered above average injury costs every year since 2020. Those costs are calculated by how much money a club pays an injured player while he is out of action.
Newcastle United, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool have consistently experienced injury levels above the league average.
James Burrows, Howden’s head of sport, says one of the biggest surprises in this year’s data was the huge increase in young players getting injuries that are leading to longer lay-offs.
He said: ”For the under 21 cohort, the severity of the injury has increased over the last four years. So in 2020/2021 the number of days out on average for an under 21 player was 17 days, and for the 2023/24 season that has risen to 32 days.”
So what does Burrows put such a leap down to?
“In the first two years of the report the impact of the Covid era saw younger players filling in for older players," he said.
"But we also believe the advent of the five-substitute rule saw players being used with more frequency.
“In terms of the Premier League, over the course of the last four years the cost of injury has risen almost exponentially in comparison to the average cost over all five leagues.”
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