Play less, get paid less: Could that ease concerns of overworked players?

Two things are pretty obvious when it comes to the question of whether top footballers play too many games, and whether they ought to consider strike action.

One is that this isn’t “workers vs. owners” or “us vs. them” — it’s really “them vs. them vs. them vs. them vs. them.” There aren’t two sides to this: rather, there are half a dozen competing interests involved, forming and breaking alliances and fighting their respective corners.

This makes things a heck of a lot more complex. Everyone is pushing their agenda, which despite the usual mud-slinging about greed and strong-arming, is actually fine. At the risk of sounding like someone from the Ayn Rand Institute, folks (and the organisations who represent them) are going to be self-interested and defend their positions. And that’s OK. When the situation becomes untenable, that’s when everybody takes a step back and you reach a compromise. It’s how negotiations work.

The other thing is that there’s very obviously a path forward. In fact, there’s a whole range of solutions. They might involve some folks giving something up, but hey, that’s part of the deal. And guess who, ultimately, holds the balance of power here? The players — or, more accurately, that 0.01% of elite professionals, all of whom play for the elite clubs who, commercially, drive the business of football.

Game of thrones

For a start, the players themselves are split, even at the elite clubs. We can all empathise with Rodri, Kevin De Bruyne and Erling Haaland complaining about too many games, but they turn up to training every day with fellow senior professionals who, if anything, would appreciate a few more matches — like, say, Matheus Nunes who played all of 34 games in all competitions last season for Manchester City and Portugal, making a grand total of 16 starts. Or Jack Grealish, the £100 million man, who featured in 40 games (26 as a starter).

And that’s at Man City, who are stacked with internationals and go deep in cup competitions. The majority of Premier League teams have 20-odd senior pros under contract, and most won’t feature in more than 40 games. If you don’t get on the pitch, you don’t get seen and your career doesn’t progress.

The clubs — the elite ones from the elite leagues, the aspiring ones from the midsized leagues and the no-names you’ve never heard of — all want to play games. That’s how they make money, that’s how their players improve, that’s how they grow. They don’t come out explicitly and say this because nobody wants to appear callous and at top clubs, they’re OK with a coach backing the “Rodri du jour” and talking about how there are too many games because it’s just one guy giving his opinion and it will be forgotten by the next news cycle. (Ever wonder why you never hear a chairman or chief executive moan about too many games?)

The player unions understand this all too well, and they know where their bread is buttered. This isn’t the United States, which means there is no collective bargaining agreement. The unions represent players at all levels, which is why they’ve been careful to highlight the player welfare issue (talking about both “overload” and “underload,” the latter applying to the guys who rarely play) while at the same time making it clear that the issue isn’t the domestic leagues with their 20-team top flights in England, Spain and Italy, but rather things like the expanded UEFA formats in the Champions League and Europa League, or the newly expanded FIFA Club World Cup.

That suits the leagues like the Premier League just fine because they don’t want to be the bad guys and, obviously, don’t want to reduce the number of domestic games because that’s the “inventory” they sell to fans and from which the cash flows back to the clubs.

That leaves UEFA and FIFA as the bad guys, except they too have their own arguments.

There’s the fact that their competitions help provide the commercial platforms that allow the elite footballers to enjoy the fame and fortune they enjoy. In UEFA’s case, the expansion of its competitions came directly at the request of the European clubs who play in them who — surprise! — want to play more games, in part so they can pay the big salaries to the big players.

As for FIFA, its mission statement — quite literally — is “to develop the game around the world,” and that means serving the many professional clubs outside Europe who see the potential of a Club World Cup and who are shut out (for geographic reasons) from the riches of the Champions League. Not to mention the other obvious fact: UEFA and FIFA don’t hang on to the money they generate. The vast majority of it gets redistributed to clubs (mostly to the richest clubs who employ the players who play too many games) and federations around the world.

Now, nobody is gullible enough to believe that UEFA and FIFA (and the other confederations) do this because they’re altruistic and love to give away money. But they do have a clear incentive to generate money and give it away because their leaders are elected and if they do it well enough, they’re going to hang on to their jobs. They’re the de facto CEOs of a corporation whose shareholders are clubs and federations. They have every reason to want to keep them happy.

That’s the reality of the game’s ecosystem. There are competing interests and misaligned incentives everywhere you look, from those cited above to the perennial power struggles between FIFA and UEFA, to the fact that the domestic leagues, UEFA, FIFA and the clubs themselves all chase the same sponsorship dollars.

But you know what? It’s OK, it really is. It’s a “you do you” thing. There’s no point making moral judgments here. Not of FIFA and UEFA, who want to generate more money; not of the unions, who fret about some guys playing too much and others playing too little; not of the leagues, who won’t budge an inch; not of the elite players, who knowingly and willingly sign enormous contracts and then complain about having to do the work; not of the clubs, who try to squeeze every cent they can because they’re almost all losing money and will gladly schedule “glamour friendlies” halfway around the world if the fixture list would allow them to.

Everybody is looking out for themselves and their constituents, which is kinda the way it should be. And if we do reach a breaking point — meaning some sort of strike — then they’ll all have to give in a little and reach a compromise.

A simple solution

You’ve probably figured out by now that money is at the heart of this issue. Simply put, most big clubs — with their maniacal, “grow at all costs” mentality — have overspent and are trying to limit their losses by chasing revenue everywhere they can, which means playing more games.

Well, considering that the bulk of a club’s costs is wages, there’s a fairly straightforward solution: players taking pay cuts in exchange for fewer games to preserve their health. Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti raised this possibility just last week: “The aim is to play less games, so I don’t think the players will have any problems to lower their wages if they play less.”

That’s a very reasonable starting point. And maybe the solution isn’t to have the clubs play less but rather have the overloaded players play less.

What if, when Haaland goes to negotiate his next deal (say, $40m a season for five years), his agent says: “OK, we’ll take 80% of that, $32m, in exchange for having Erling be available for only 80% of the fixtures”?

He’d still be a very rich guy; he’d still make a ton commercially; he would have more flexibility to look after his health; and he’d still play in all the big games. City could still market him to high heaven; they’d still have him when it mattered; they’d be playing the same number of games (and making the same revenue); and they’d be saving themselves $8m a year. That’s more than enough to hire an army of nerds and sports scientists to help determine which players to rest and when.

And sure, you’d have to negotiate something, perhaps proportionally, with the national sides too. Maybe you involve travel as well. Maybe the elites who are in these situations can hire their own doctors and sports scientists to get second opinions.

OK, so maybe the “80% formula” isn’t the best way to preserve someone’s health. Maybe it’s longer mandatory breaks in the summer. Maybe it’s no more than seven games in a calendar month. Maybe you make the calculation on minutes instead. Maybe there’s some other method based around the players’ vitals that can be used (lord knows they collect enough data about them), or maybe it’s all those things.

Whatever the case, there’s a way to mitigate the harm done to players while preserving the current ecosystem. We have mandatory breaks for safety reasons that apply to professions from air traffic controllers to long-distance truck drivers. There’s no reason it can’t be done for footballers too.

It’s just common sense, but until the folks most affected by this — the tiny number of elite players who are overworked — sit down and realize that their situation is unique and that they have agency and power to force this sort of compromise, we won’t get there.

I’m pretty confident we will get there, though, and pretty quickly. We just need to cut through all the other political score-settling, winning talking points for media and moral judgments among the many stakeholders.