- How the transfer market is going for the top seven clubs
- When Arsenal players are returning, and who they will be playing
By Tony Attwood
A recent report by CIES Football Observatory looked at the number of official games played by clubs in 40 of the top leagues worldwide. While it is sometimes suggested by the media that players get injured because they are playing ever more game, the research shows that “teams are not playing more matches per season.”
Where there is a problem is with the fact that players are being called upon to play more and more internationals, which in turn induces more injuries.
This coming season there will be no mid-winter break but there will be those pernicious international breaks – three of them in fact in the first three full months of the season. They run from September 1st to September 9th, October 6th to October 14th and November 10th to 18th.
Then at least we do get some respite from the international managers taking our players, running them into the ground and then handing them back to be ready for next time (as Arsene Wenger once put it when comparing them to car thieves), with the next break being March 23 to March 31, next year.
That is a total of 36 days on which Arsenal players can be taken by international managers whose organisations still can’t even run matches with regular outbreaks of crown trouble. (Indeed if international teams were subject to the same regulations as league teams, most of them wouldn’t be allowed to play home games this season).
So we can see exactly why players get exhausted and feel run into the ground. Clubs play the same number of game, but internationals are escalating out of control.
They also estimate that around five percent of clubs play 60 or more games a season (excluding friendlies).
Put at its simplest, the number of days for international “breaks” has gone up but the clubs are playing the same number of league and cup games..
So as with all other analyses and studies there is no doubt, the problems within football from players being played too much come entirely from the international calendar. AND NO ONE I SACTING TO STOP THIS OR EVEN COMPLAIN ABOUT IT.
We can add this understanding to the fact that the crowd problems within the game come almost entirely from international matches where crowds storm the gates, or where insufficient action is taken to keep people in the stadium safe.
What is interesting however is that yet again the media make nothing of these findings because they are totally welded to supporting everything that the international organisations do.
This is even when, as in England, the international bodies such as the FA have shown themselves to be totally incapable of dealing with the most serious issue of all: the issue of child abuse within football.
This is indeed the reason why the UK government has been so keen to institute a Football Regulator wherein there will at least be a chance of investigating these question of child abuse within football. The information that Untold has researched (but which we dare not publish because they exist as reports which we don’t have the resources to validate independently) show that not only has there been continuing abuse of young people in football clubs but that the police are, at least on occasion, not willing to take complaints from individual parents.
One of the problems that we have identified is that in many places there is a close liaison between a football club and the local police, in which the club is able to tell the police how many (if any) officers it requires at a match, and which issues it doesn’t want the police to look at (such as allegations of child sex abuse).
This has resulted at many grounds (and Arsenal is one) in which few or no uniformed police are seen within the precincts of the ground. Now that seems to work very well at Arsenal from what I observe, and I make no complaint about that, but there is a growing feeling (and here I am not citing Arsenal at all) that those close links can result in the police not investigating any allegations against a club over child abuse.
Thus if a parent goes to a club and reports that the club has not looked after a young player properly by, for example, playing him when injured, the police might well start by going to their regular contacts in the club and asking for an explanation.
The club in return will indicate that they would not welcome police involvement in the matter, and that investigating could harm the close relationship between police and club over crowd matters, and so everything is left.
Indeed there are clubs where directors have very friendly relationships with the police, which inevitably means serious allegations will be washed under the carpet.
