THE PREMIER League season hasn’t even kicked off yet and already there’s too much football.
Matches are too long, fixture lists are too crammed, players are burnt out, managers are overworked and fans are reaching saturation point.
Football matches take too long to finish these days
Will matches ever end? Will players ever get a proper rest? Will football ever stop?
At this rate, there will be so much football that people will have to stop launching new football podcasts because there will be too much actual football for anyone to ever listen to any of them.
Which is perhaps the only positive in all this.
Sunday’s Community Shield lasted for 106 minutes, including first-half injury-time, and Saturday’s League One fixture between Northampton and Stevenage went on for 112 minutes and 36 seconds.
Two-hour matches will soon be commonplace and, if knockout games go to extra-time and penalties, we’ll have a three-hour contest before long.
But that’s only part of it.
On August 19, Manchester City face Newcastle at 8pm on a Saturday — a new regular Premier League kick-off time that nobody ever asked for.
From next season, a club reaching the Champions League final must play between two and four extra matches — and good luck in working out the new ‘Swiss-style’ format in that competition.
In 2025, the World Club Cup — already a schedule-clogging irrelevance — will become a 32-team summer tournament.
When the Premier League was launched, it was originally supposed to be reduced to 18 clubs as, even 30 years ago, people realised there was too much football.
And yet still we have two-legged League Cup semi-finals, the ‘Premier League Summer Series’ and England playing qualifiers against Malta, San Marino and the forest moon of Endor.
Pep Guardiola — whose City side face a 10pm kick-off in the European Super Cup against Sevilla in Athens next week — was vocal about all this after the Community Shield, which saw his team concede a 101st-minute equaliser.
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And that is despite the fact the Premier League season hasn’t even started
Kevin De Bruyne and Raphael Varane have also spoken out about elite players’ increasing workload.
It might be tempting to urge very rich men to stop moaning about working longer hours for more money, when the rest of society is working longer hours for less and less money. But we’ve hopefully gone past the stage where we assume footballers are robots who should be able to cope with endless pressure.
And anyway it’s not just about them.
While broadcasters demand more and more ‘content’, has anybody wondered whether actual people want to consume it all?
An ever-growing number of us do not regularly watch ‘linear’ television, while younger audiences are less likely to watch 90 minutes of football, let alone 120 minutes, preferring to watch highlights packages. And, presumably, listen to podcasts.
Those extended playing times come from an edict for referees to crack down on time-wasting and dissent.
The new packed schedule will add to fans’ woes as matches are becoming endless
We might all agree that time-wasting is cheating and therefore needs stamping down upon.
But unless a countdown clock is introduced, with a standard amount of ball-in-play time — 60 minutes has been suggested but 50 minutes might be more apt — there will still be frequent arguments about the amount of time added on, so this won’t solve the problem.
While you might be delighted to see an excessive amount of injury-time if your team is 1-0 down, you don’t go into matches thinking ‘I really hope this goes on for far longer than 90 minutes’.
If you’re at the game, particularly for an evening kick-off, you’ll want to get home or catch last orders.
If you’re watching at home, you might want to actually speak to your family or friends, or do whatever else you used to do before football took over every waking hour of your entire life.
Match-going supporters certainly don’t want matches that finish at 10.15pm on a Saturday, or any other night.
Players’ schedules will become even more grueling, while fans may lose their weekends
And presumably even most armchair fans have social lives.
Football is going against the grain here.
Cricket is getting shorter and shorter, and one of the great attractions for golfers to join the rebel LIV Tour — apart from sack-loads of Saudi money — was the reduction of tournaments from four rounds to three, giving them extra days off.
Sport is supposed to be about escapism. Following football, in particular, is meant to be a release from our daily lives.
It isn’t supposed to actually dominate our existence. And I feel so strongly about this issue that I solemnly swear not to launch a podcast to discuss it any further.
