The World Cup and fatigue: ‘Some players have gone three summers without a rest. That’s wrong’

Declan Rice is Arsenal’s running man, a driving force still bidding to make this the club’s greatest season.The central midfielder could not inspire a first piece of silverware when losing to Manchester City in the League Cup final at the weekend, but he might yet end the campaign with plenty, as a fight continues on three other fronts.Rice will want this to be a club season that extends all the way through to a Champions League final on May 30, but like so many of the elite, fatigue is the lingering threat ahead of a World Cup summer with England.Sunday’s final was Rice’s 50th appearance and 44th start of the season for club and country. There is the capacity for another 18 — 15 with Arsenal and three with England — before the World Cup is even underway, with the likelihood Rice will have played more than 70 games by the time England’s summer adventures are over.The workload is heavy but not unique. Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk brought up his own half-century for the season in the Champions League rout of Galatasaray last week, a feat Newcastle United’s Sandro Tonali had managed by March 7. Others in the Premier League, such as international regulars Martin Zubimendi, Erling Haaland, Bernardo Silva and Malick Thiaw, are all lining up to do the same in the coming weeks. The League Cup final was Declan Rice’s 50th appearance of the season for club and country (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)The pattern is repeated across Europe’s biggest leagues as the first summer World Cup since 2018 comes into view.Games, games, games. The demands are greater than ever at the highest level, all of which lead to a tournament that will ask more of the players than any previous World Cup. It promises to be hot and is guaranteed to be long, spanning five and a half weeks with the additional round of knockout fixtures.It all comes a few months after AFCON, a year after the FIFA Club World Cup, and two from both the last European Championship and Copa America in 2024. It will be the first time in men’s football that there has been such an unrelenting run. The concerns of players’ unions are that a bloated schedule will have its inevitable consequences as players head to the United States, Canada and Mexico in June.“Historically, we’ve only looked at the calendar from a competition-to-competition perspective,” Maheta Molango, chief executive of the English Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), tells The Athletic. “All of those in isolation can make sense, but when you put one next to the other, you realise it is unfair. Connect the dots and you start to see that it cannot make sense.“We’re seeing people not just talking about the player perspective — where people say: ‘Listen, these guys make a lot of money’ — but it’s a question now of the quality of the show. It’s really affecting the quality of what we see on the pitch because it is not sustainable.”Chelsea head coach Liam Rosenior raised his own concerns last week.Winning the first 32-team Club World Cup last summer brought prestige under his predecessor, Enzo Maresca, but a tournament that also included Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Bayern Munich has led to Chelsea enduring a flat season.The annual workload report from FIFPro, the international players’ union, detailed that Chelsea were only able to enjoy 13 days’ preparation before the Premier League season began in August. PSG had seven. Chelsea have a multitude of problems, but Rosenior has accepted his squad is now running out of gas.“They’ve played over 100 games in 18 months and had no break,” he told reporters after Chelsea’s second-leg defeat to PSG in the last 16 of the Champions League. “It’s not an excuse, it’s a byproduct of success at the Club World Cup, but you’re seeing with players that if I don’t manage their minutes, the likelihood of getting injured increases highly.” Chelsea’s players are suffering from the rigours of last summer (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)The numbers are telling. Chelsea have now played 113 competitive games since the start of the 2024-25 season. Real Madrid have now played 114, with the potential for another 14 before the World Cup begins.This is not the fault of the Club World Cup alone. The top English clubs remain part of a domestic competition that has no wish to fall from a 20-team league to 18, while also clinging to a second knockout competition in the League Cup. Mikel Arteta, speaking to reporters last February, called it an “accident waiting to happen” when asking players to “load, load, load” in a season.The Champions League is also demanding more of its participants since expanding last season to accommodate two more group games. Although there is a more direct route if avoiding the play-off round, Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, or PSG will play 17 games if they are to advance to this season’s final, the equivalent of half their domestic league schedule. All three of those were in the U.S. for the Club World Cup last summer, too.“We’re seeing increasing congestion for the star players, so the more successful you are, the more you’re asked to put your body at risk,” says Steve Barrett, vice-president of sports performance at Playermaker, a tech company working with Premier League clubs and national associations.“Everyone from a performance and medical side is trying to get the best out of players, and it’s that fine balance between performance enhancement and injury risk.“With any individual, you try to manage what you believe is best for them. But there comes a point when a player goes over that curve beyond optimal performance and starts to go towards injury risk. This is the first time some players are being asked to go back to back to back (with summer tournaments) in the men’s game, so it’s going to be difficult.” Julian Alvarez has played 274 times since February 2022 (Angel Martinez/Getty Images)One player, in particular, has become an unwitting poster boy in the workload debate.Julian Alvarez, the Atletico Madrid and Argentina winger, has played at a World Cup, a Copa America, an Olympics, and a Club World Cup in the past four years, amassing 274 appearances for club and country since beginning a new season with River Plate in February 2022. Only in the summer of 2023, at the end of what was effectively a 16-month season, did he enjoy a traditional break.“I don’t have the power to look into the future, but you only have to look at what is happening this season,” says Molango, when asked about his concerns for this summer.“Is Inter worse? I watched the (Champions League last-16) game against Bodo/Glimt and it was a team that was very fit against a team that was very tired. Look at France: are PSG so much worse than last season and Lens unbelievable? Again, I believe it is a consequence of them having a busy summer.“Human beings are not robots, and, unfortunately, it will reach a stage where they will pay the price for this out-of-control schedule we have right now.”Data examining the impact of the Club World Cup’s addition to the calendar is currently inconclusive. The exhaustive annual injury report led by Howdens, the UK-based insurance broker, suggested issues arising from last summer’s tournament and the shortened pre-season had been “minimal” and, assessing the participating teams between June and October 2025 and the same period in 2024, has actually recorded a decline in injury numbers.That fails to take into account the majority of the 2025-26 domestic campaign, though, with the business end yet to come.This will be the closest a Champions League final has fallen to a World Cup. Just 12 days stand between Europe’s best two teams meeting in Budapest on May 30 and the opening game between Mexico and South Africa on June 11. The same gap was 19 days ahead of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, as it was for 2014 in Brazil. Budapest’s Puskas Arena will host the Champions League final just 12 days before the start of the World Cup (David Balogh/Getty Images)Even the Premier League will run to within three weeks of the World Cup beginning, concluding at the same point as La Liga and Serie A on May 24. That represents a 19-day gap for rest. Ahead of Italia 90, there were 34 days.The risks are increased but not insurmountable, according to former Liverpool head physio Andy Renshaw. “The increased number of games and the increased importance of them for clubs do bring an awful lot of pressure for those players to be managed, and that does increase the likelihood of fatigue going into a tournament like the World Cup,” he says.“The international players are the best players. They’ll play more games for their club. But you would hope now, with the support staff with each club, that those players will be managed with their load.“When I say load, I mean distance covered, games played. They measure so many physical parameters in terms of output that we can periodise players well for every single game. You would expect the increased number of games and competitions would make it harder, but if the players are managed well, I don’t see why that should be an issue.”This, of course, is a World Cup like no other. The extra round of games that comes with an expansion to 48 teams means this World Cup will last for 38 days and conclude later than any other.The Premier League has responded by pushing back the start of next season to the weekend of August 22/23, but that, in turn, means the 2026-27 campaign will not be over until May 30. The 2027 Champions League final, meanwhile, will be played in Madrid on the implausibly late date of June 5.Question marks will inevitably hang over the conditions of players heading to this World Cup. There are too many intangibles for clear assessments, but England head coach Thomas Tuchel was alert to the dangers when naming a 35-man squad for this break’s two friendlies. Thomas Tuchel named a 35-man England squad for the friendlies against Uruguay and Japan (Andrew Redington/Getty Images)Time off will be given for the opening game against Uruguay to what Tuchel considers his core squad, a list that includes Rice. That group will only come into contention when England face Japan on Tuesday. That was effectively an admission that some would benefit from rest, a reality Premier League managers cannot run from if also playing European football.“It depends on each individual, but a lot of players are hanging on at this stage of the season,” says Barrett, who has previously worked in the Premier League and with the Football Association.“That’s as much psychological as physical. We know players are capable of going for longer than a season, but that brings mental fatigue and stresses that are building up. But if they’ve played in a lot of games, then their bodies are going to need time to recover.“A lot will come down to how the international teams manage their players. It was a smart idea from Tuchel to give some of his players a break for the week to get at least some rest. The top players have been playing all the time, so they’ll just need managing. The reason they’re elite players is that they’ve got the mindset to keep going, but there’ll come a point when they can’t reach the physical levels they achieved.“Will they be able to do it in a World Cup final? Probably, because they’re going to motivate themselves that much if they get there. But equally, could they be in better condition? Again, the answer is probably. There’s a lot of research that says inadequate preparation and inadequate recovery bring risk.”FIFPro has long watched this train coming down the tracks.The global union, which represents 70,000 professional footballers, has lobbied for change to FIFA’s International Match Calendar and supported legal actions, launched in 2024, to challenge the governing body. A mandatory four-week summer break has consistently been among its greatest priorities.“I do think, psychologically, it’s important the players have a rest and time away from football,” says Renshaw. “They’re still human beings, they still have families, and they still need that time after what can be an incessant run through a season.“They need a break and a change of stimulus. A World Cup will bring a variable that will make things a little bit more difficult for people to manage. Club staff will want players for the club. They don’t necessarily periodise players to go into a World Cup game schedule.”Few of the elite players tied to European clubs have enjoyed that luxury of a four-week break since 2023, but FIFA has consistently stuck to its own messaging that it is behind “around one per cent” of games played by top teams and less than two per cent of games played by national teams. The bigger the tournaments it stages, too, the more money that can be redistributed to its associations. Maheta Molango (left) and Richard Masters, CEO of the Premier League, present an award to James Milner (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)This World Cup, though, is undeniably different. There will be huge travel demands in a tournament spanning three sprawling nations and an acceptance that some afternoon games will need to be played in inhospitable heat. Temperatures at the Club World Cup reached 36 degrees.“In football, we talk about everything but the product,” says Molango. “It would be like Apple having meetings and not talking about the iPhone. They talk about the salespeople, the location of the shop, but not getting a good product on the market. Can you imagine that?“That’s what is happening in football. We talk about everything but our iPhone.“Players don’t want to be perceived as victims. They don’t want to be an example. But it’s very worrying to see players like Lamine Yamal and the injuries he’s suffering. You realise that players like (Cole) Palmer and (Jude) Bellingham can go three summers without a holiday. Then there’s Rice, who might have played close to 70 games before the World Cup has started, but they are the people who get criticised when they don’t perform. That is unfair.“The World Cup in isolation is great, but people will forget that some players have gone three summers without a rest. That’s the bit that’s absolutely wrong.”The world will be watching, and a first summer World Cup since 2018 promises to test players like never before.

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