Facing Liverpool in the Champions League final on Saturday May 28, he will certainly start in the Madrid midfield. Now 37, Luka Modric will play the 51st match of an already busy 2021-2022 season. This infernal rhythm, the Croatian knows it only too well: already last season, he had recorded 63 games on the clock with Real Madrid.
Like him, hundreds of professional players juggle between club and selection, national and European competitions, at an ever increasing pace. This is the alarm signal from Fifpro, the union representing professional football players around the world, in a report published Thursday, May 26, after a meeting with its French counterpart, the National Union of Footballers. professionals (UNFP), in Paris.
The entity calls for a “urgent reform“after a study conducted between October and December 2021 among 1,055 professional players, and around a hundred experts (coaches, doctors, scientists, physical trainers), questioned about the overloaded calendar of recent seasons.
“Pressure on player health reveals governance crisis in our sport“, with “an outdated model that sees players as resources“, explains Fifpro, which asks competition organizers to listen “the players and what their bodies make us hear“.
Some 54% of players surveyed admitted to having suffered an injury caused by an overloaded schedule. Fifpro claims that 41% of the players on its panel have already played 10 games in a row at least once without ever having more than four days off between two games, since 2018.
The most unsustainable pace is attributed to Luka Modric (Real Madrid), who has played up to 24 games in a row without having more than four days off between two of them, during the 2020-2021 season, i.e. four times more than the “maximum recommended“. The union is also concerned about the shortening of the off-season periods. Less than a third of the players questioned had at least four weeks off in the off-season in 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.
The Croatian and his 63 games on the counter that season, is also one of the players who exceed the quota of recommended games per season set at 55 for nearly 9 experts on this panel out of 10.
Out of a panel of 265 players selected for this study, just over a quarter (27%) exceeded this recommended threshold last season. A decreasing rate if we compare to the figures before the pandemic. Thus, in 2018-2019, more than a third (38%) of players had exceeded 55 games in a season. A risk for the body, but also for the mind.
Because certain extreme cases alert the organization, such as that of the Spaniard Mikel Oyarzabal, who only had a six-day break between the Olympic Games in the summer of 2021, and the resumption of training at Real Sociedad. few weeks later. This accumulation of fatigue would also have significant psychological effects, according to the Fifpro study. 82% of the experts surveyed have indeed observed mental health problems in players who are victims of an overloaded schedule.
“We are athletes, not machines. Our bodies and our minds have natural limits. When we do too much or rest too little, we break down“, worry, in a forum published by Fifpro, professional players, represented in particular by several big names such as Leonardo Bonucci, Jonathan David and Arturo Vidal. An important speech while the “New Formula Champions League” will appear in a year with always more meetings, and that the question of a World Cup every two years is put forward by Fifa.