Rodri is a symptom of a sport at breaking point – and we are all to blame
It had to be Rodri, right?
The man who before this season according to football data website Transfermarktwho had missed just five games for Manchester City since joining the club in 2019 due to injury, is out – and possibly for the rest of the season.
Why did it have to be Rodri who suffered a serious knee injury in Sunday’s 2-2 draw with Arsenal? Because football rarely fails to deliver cruel twists of irony and it was Rodri who last week said that players were close to going on strike because they were playing too much football.
The man who never gets injured now gets seriously injured, just weeks after suffering a moderate injury (with a hamstring strain).
Has Rodri been felled twice in quick succession because he has been overplayed in recent years, his body ground to mincemeat by a relentless, endless football schedule that is jammed to the rafters? Well, without access to Manchester City’s personalised tax records and whether Rodri was already in the ‘red zone’ for the Arsenal game, it’s impossible to know for sure.
And yes, players get injured all the time and yes, serious knee injuries aren’t always workload related. Maybe it was just bad luck, move on, nothing to see here.
What we do know is that more football generally leads to more injuries, and a serious injury to a player who many believe can win the Ballon d’Or next month will only add to people’s concerns.
Within the sport, Rodri’s comments had already received waves of support. “Rodri is right,” Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibault Courtois said in a conversation with Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos“People say we earn a lot of money, that we can’t complain – and that’s true – but we have to find a balance because the best can’t always play.”
Thibaut Courtois supported Rodri’s call for footballers to play less (Angel Martinez/Getty Images)
Chelsea head coach Enzo Maresca agreed. “In terms of games, it’s too many,” he said before the weekend’s game at West Ham. “I don’t think we’re protecting players. For me, the number of games we have is completely wrong.”
They weren’t alone. Aston Villa captain John McGinn voiced similar concerns, as did Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson, City manager Pep Guardiola, La Liga president Javier Tebas and Barcelona’s Jules Kounde.
But while coaches and players largely agree, match planners outside the domestic leagues, such as FIFA and UEFA, appear much less inclined to cancel matches.
UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin Gazzetta dello Sport told two years ago: “It’s easy to attack FIFA and UEFA, but it’s simple. If you play less, you get less money. The ones who should complain are the factory workers who get €1,000 (£843; $1,110) a month.”
Meanwhile, FIFA states on its website: “Of primary importance in the present and future of football is the protection of the health and welfare of players.
“The proposed calendar overhaul could include mandatory rest and preparation periods, resulting in fewer matches, less travel and less time away from clubs and families.”
However, it is the expansion of the Club World Cup to 32 teams by FIFA at the end of July in the US that adds fuel to the fire, especially if you are a fan of Manchester City or Chelsea.
City, who play Watford in the Carabao Cup tonight, 49 hours after their match against Arsenal ends, could play up to 75 games this season if they reach the finals of all the competitions they play in. Chelsea could play 74.
Add to that 10 international matches scheduled during the season and someone like Rodri (if he wasn’t injured) or Bernardo Silva would have a whopping 85 games scheduled between early August and mid-July. That works out to one game every four days.
It is undoubtedly too much. Rodri estimated last week that 40-50 games per season would be ideal, but anything above that inevitably leads to a drop in performance due to fatigue.
Rodri faces long-term absence (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
The immediate counter-argument to this topic is often that players earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a week and therefore have no right to complain about how badly they are being beaten.
It’s a bit of a minor point, since we are the ones who suffer, not just the players, like Rodri, Kevin De Bruyne or [insert players from your favourite team here] are in the treatment room rather than on the pitch. And besides, is money really an excuse to be rough with player welfare? Is it okay to beat up a player earning £200,000 a week but not a player earning £100,000 a week? Where do you draw the line?
And we’re all complicit, aren’t we? Clubs happily accept the money they get for extra games in UEFA or FIFA competitions without protesting about the welfare of their players, or organise energy-sapping two-week pre-season tours to the US or the Far East purely to make money. Or they do post-season tours to Australia after a gruelling season and before a summer with two major international tournaments, a la Newcastle and Tottenham Hotspur.
And we, the media, or fans, we are all complicit in the fact that we just keep swallowing all the football into our metaphorical goal mouths. We pay Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Amazon, CBS and whoever to watch the games, we constantly scour social media for football content, or play fantasy football, or download club apps.
The whole thing is disgustingly gluttonous. Brian Clough’s famous quote about televised football (“You don’t want roast beef and Yorkshire pudding every night and twice on a Sunday”) was made absolute decades ago.
And it’s not getting any smaller any time soon. The Champions League has been expanded to 36 teams, the Club World Cup goes to 32 teams, the World Cup grows from 64 games to 104, women’s football gets bigger every year, there are over 1,000 EFL games on British TV this season and there’s even a new competition for non-League and Premier League under-21 teams.
What’s stopping it? Player strikes would bring decision-makers to the table, but it’s hard to see anything other than the calendar being shortened to allow for longer breaks, for example at the end of a season or for a longer winter break mid-season. Leagues, apart perhaps from the top national leagues, will not get smaller now that they are currently getting bigger.
GALLING DEEPER
Should footballers go on strike over workload after Rodri’s comments? – The debate
Probably the only thing that can slow down football is the dwindling number of spectators. There are signs that the younger generation is less interested in watching live football and more interested in the highlights, given the declining attention spans and high costs of attending live matches. But we are talking about the kind of decline that takes a long time to show in the revenues of TV companies.
There will be a tipping point at some point. It may take a flood of injuries, or early retirements, or a drop in football standards through fatigue. Until then, money is more important than anything else — we all feed the football money machine.
We are all guilty.
(Top photo: Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)
