MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) – The chorus of frustrated players and managers speaking out against football’s gruelling fixture schedule continues to grow, with Liverpool defender Ibrahima Konate the latest to say earlier this week he would support players’ right to strike.
Conversations at recent team press conferences have turned to the schedule’s physical toll, with Manchester City’s Rodri saying last month that players could be ready to lay down tools.
Despite the calls for strike action, whether it is likely in the English football structure where the richest players earn hundreds of times more than those at the other end of the financial spectrum is another question.
“It is possible, but I would say at the moment it’s incredibly difficult,” Sarah Carrick, an expert in sports law and a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, told Reuters.
“In the Premier League, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) would need to ballot their 5,000 members, in the way any union ballots members to go on strike…
“It’s incredibly difficult to ask a player in a lower league team who is maybe on 500 pounds ($652) a week to give that up to come out in solidarity with someone who is earning millions of pounds.”
The expanded Champions League and the new FIFA Club World Cup formats, alongside enlarged national team competitions, are at the crux of the issue.
Global governing body FIFA has defended its calendar as necessary, while the president of European body UEFA has said the issue affects a minority of players.
“The ones with lower salaries and hardly 11 players are not complaining. They love to play,” Aleksander Ceferin said at the European Clubs’ Association General Assembly on Thursday.
There is a disparity in workload with the most demanding schedules faced by the top teams and players. Rodri estimated he would have played as many as 80 games this season, but in a cruel twist, the Spaniard suffered a season-ending knee injury days after his comments.
“Even within the Premier League, not all clubs are playing in Europe, so do you even get the other teams’ support when they’re only playing 40, 50 games a season?” Carrick said.
LEGAL CHALLENGES
Carrick believes that challenging governing bodies in the courts would be more successful than mounting a picket line.
European Leagues, LaLiga and FIFPRO Europe, a branch of the global players’ union FIFPRO, are jointly filing a formal complaint on Monday to the European Commission against FIFA on competition law grounds, arguing the international calendar is unsustainable for national leagues and risks the wellbeing of players.
FIFA said in July that the current calendar was unanimously approved by the FIFA Council following a comprehensive consultation, which included FIFPRO and league bodies.
“There have been a lot of legal challenges to sports governing bodies at the moment,” said Carrick, noting last week’s verdict on FIFA’s transfer rules and the recent verdict in Manchester City’s legal case against the league over rules on commercial deals.
“All of these judgements are like this recurring theme that sports governing bodies are acting illegally,” Carrick said. “So I think the key for FIFPRO or the players is to focus on that legal challenge, because they are winning these cases in court at the moment.”
While the PFA did not respond to a request for comment, chief executive Maheta Molango, speaking recently about potential strike action, said: “The PFA is about what the players want us to do – we’ve always said that we’ll go as far as they want us to go.”
Premier League chief executive Richard Masters has said the congested schedule may have reached a tipping point, while FIFA has argued their calendar is the only way to ensure that international football can continue to exist alongside domestic and continental club football.
Labour disputes are relatively common in major North American sports, the most recent being a three-month lockout in Major League Baseball in 2021-22.
There have been several national soccer strikes in the last 15 years, most recently in Uruguay in 2023, when players union La Mutual Uruguaya de Futbolistas led a strike over a failure to agree to minimum player conditions.
($1 = 0.7662 pounds)
(Reporting by Lori Ewing; Editing by Toby Davis)
