Former Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund manager Jurgen Klopp has long been a vocal critic of the increasing fixture congestion in top-level football and the impact it has on the welfare and well-being of football professionals, and he once again used his platform to demand better for players. This time, the target of his ire was the newly-refurbished FIFA Club World Cup, now extended to a month-long window in the European summer break.
With fixtures piling up particularly for the top teams, who already play upwards of 60 club games in a 10-month window, the summer has now been taken up by another competition that further reduces their rest and recovery time. Klopp was enraged by this fact, and hammered the decision-makers for not considering the impact this would have on players.
“It’s all about the game and not the surrounding events – and that’s why the Club World Cup is the worst idea ever implemented in football in this regard,” said the German furiously in an interview with Welt am Sonntag.
“People who have never had or do not have anything to do with day-to-day business anymore are coming up with something. There is insane money for participating, but it’s also not for every club,” continued Klopp. While manager of Liverpool, Klopp often questioned how many matches his team were forced to play as they competed in six or seven different competitions in a single season.
“Last year it was the Copa [America] and the European Championship, this year it’s the Club World Cup, and next year the World Cup. That means no real recovery for the players involved, neither physically nor mentally,” explained Klopp, now the head of global football for Red Bull. “I have serious fears, that players will suffer injuries they’ve never had before next season. If not next season, then it will happen at the World Cup or afterwards.”
Klopp warns FIFA: ‘The entire product loses value’
Klopp’s views are also upheld by FIFPro, the global representative organisation for footballers, who had raised these concerns with FIFA in a meeting last winter, but not to much success in terms of reversing this trend.
The players have also increasingly begun to make their frustrations heard: Spanish and Manchester City midfielder Rodri played a whopping 63 matches in the 2023/24 season, and while he received the Ballon d’Or for his excellence and reliability, suffered an ACL injury that ruled him out of this season just passed.
Rodri had said that players were close to going on strike as the fixture list mounted upwards almost unilaterally from the powers that be in world football, and his sentiments were echoed by Klopp: “We constantly expect the players to go into every game as if it were their last. We tell them that 70 or 75 times a year. But it can’t go on like this. We have to make sure they have breaks, because if they don’t get them, they won’t be able to deliver top performances – and if they can’t achieve that anymore, the entire product loses value.”
Any European team that reaches the Club World Cup final will have less than a month before the official start of the fresh season, which means players might receive next to no time away for a summer break. With football injuries also on the rise, how FIFA responds to such criticisms and increasing pressure could be an important storyline to follow in the coming months.
