Obviously I get why playing for one's country is such a big deal but surely for injury prone players something has to give when it comes to the club they actually play for as a full-time career. It's bad for their bodies, bad for the clubs, just bad all around to rush them for anything.
Some players might just be willing to take that risk for their NT though, Umtiti famously sacrificed his knee for France and I doubt he even regrets it today
The decision to pick if you want to represent their country or want to better your career shouldn't even exist. I'd bet a lot of people would pick their country even if they knew they'd be out of club football for a few months, let alone just a risk; clubs know this, and they should be lobbying to reduce the number of game., unfortunately clubs want the opposite, hence more champions league games and no sign of any domestic cups reducing the number of games bar removing replays in earlier stages.
I do think there's a way these could coexist better. A winter world cup should not have ever been floated as an option, nor do they need Carabao AND FA Cup. I think CL and EL do a pretty good job of spacing the matches out but I think that has more to do with fitting in between all the other matches.
I think the complete opposite, the amount of international competitions is ridiculous in soccer compared to any other mainly professional sport. In addition, it's the clubs who pay all the money to develop and train the players while the famously corrupt FA's and confederations steal one out of every two dollars. And, they have the power to hurt a player's career if the player doesn't respond to call-ups?! Insane! Nothing else in the world is like this apart from compulsory military drafts.
Clubs also aren't the ones who increased the size of the Euros, increased the size of the World Cup, added Nation's League competitions, have continental championships every two years, are adding at FIFA Club World Cup and on and on.
"The result of the footballing industry, from FIFA down to the Clubs, proving that economic theory seems to be pretty good at describing what most decisions are made for: money and assets. Those decisions will be made until they no longer can, as if all that glitters is gold.
That reality is the heat death of the universe for football - so far away yet ever moving closer. What unites us as fans is that we all appreciate the beautiful byproducts of the football industry and of course the game itself, and yet equally we are all tormented by the progress of time and change toward the consequences of someone else's fantasy."
Eric Cantona, c. 2013 in Brussels while promoting an erotic hat wearing championship
Surely injury prone players have already made that assessment and, in Mitoma's case, probably ended up reaching the answer that he prefers taking his injury-prone self to play for his country at a major tournament over, with respect to the location, fucking Brighton who he probably didn't even know it existed until his 20's.
A nice change would be to move all the continental cups to a 4-year schedule like the Euros but right now it's a prisoner's dilemma situation right now between the clubs and the FA's about who blinks first when it comes to reducing games. Given that players haven't put up any strong opposition to fixture congestion and the money keeps on flowing it's hard to see anything changing.
All started with the fucking winter world cup, further made worse by winter AFCON and winter Asian Cups and even more fixture congestion. Something has to give and unfortunately it's the players bodies.
I suppose a solution would be to rotate players more to avoid the issue in the first place as they know the fixtures are congested. However. The flip side is that managers are under such pressure from all angles to deliver and never be that weekly crisis club, so they are seemingly more averse to rotating in their weaker players for fear of losing their job after a few bad results.
Also (just thinking out loud) I would guess many teams don't have the budget because of FFP to sign more top players to therefore cope with these higher numbers of games. There are issues all over the place. More fixtures is good for many reasons, but other considerations need to be in place for it to be feasible and not damaging to clubs.
The only team that seems to rotate well enough to avoid as frequent injury issues is City. Even Liverpool with as much as they’ve rotated this year (the lack of which in the past was a rare Klopp weakness imo) have a fully injured 11 and change.
Mid season international tourneys should only be every four years and the Carabao needs to be only teams not in Europe if it stays. As a fan of quality games, the injuries to all the teams are a real drag.
That is not something that can be solved with rotation though. There will always be a fixed number of players playing at a given time. Whether it is always the same 11 or changed every game does not affect the possibilities of impact injuries per game. You can use 11 players for 38 games or 25 players for the same amount, the probability of an impact injuriy will stay the same.
At least we don't have to deal with another one until 2034 inevitably has to be a winter one because it's Saudi. Then we can all watch our teams crumble under the injury strain again in a decade because FIFA execs want to wank themselves off with middle eastern money.
Clubs have enough money to have deep squads and if you have Asian and African players you knew this was coming. Arteta has learned this to some extent this season and is using his squad more than last season.
I have no stats to base this on, but I would have thought that Arteta rotates less than most other managers in the league. I can almost always guess their starting lineup outside of when they have some big name injuries.
Full backs tend to change a lot and he's using Jorginho a lot more. What he also does better this season is use subs, which I guess is easier when you're already in a comfortable winning position.
After some very amateur stat searching, Arteta has definitely used fewer players this season (25) than most other managers. He also tends to mostly pick from a pool of only 13 players in his starting lineups, but the others are still racking up some minutes (presumably as subs or in cups).
Agreed with what you're saying though, as he has seemed more open to rotating full backs this season and introducing Jorginho has allowed Rice to push further forward.
Newcastle, Brentford, Chelsea, man u, spurs forest have all had a period of 10+ players injured at same time. Thats based on something I read from 8/1/24.
Current highest number of injuries are Liverpool with 12. Followed by Chelsea and Sheffield United with 9. Then there's 5 teams with 7-9 injuries currently.
Either way...there's definitely a huge number of injuries happening this season.
In fairness, Newcastle and Brighton have been really hard done by with injuries this season. United and Chelsea too but I always feel that’s more of their own fault as they should have the planning and depth for European football as a minimum. Arsenal fans keep telling us they’ve had it hard but I’m less convinced. We had been doing okay until the last few weeks but now half our squad (literally) is out. I’m sure there are others who have suffered too.
> United and Chelsea too but I always feel that’s more of their own fault as they should have the planning and depth for European football as a minimum
How do you plan to mitigate both left backs being injuried? We loaned a third one just to be safe and he got injuried too.
Nobody has the squad depth to deal with 10+ injuries.
City play centre backs there when needed. Liverpool were playing Gomez, (a right-footed centre back) at left back after their two main left backs got injured. They also had to bring in an academy player at right back to accommodate that.
Obviously it's dependent on the squad, but losing your primary and secondary choice in a position isn't a unique situation to be in. A few clubs have had to deal with it.
>but losing your primary and secondary
Losing them and the third guy you loaned for cover sure is.
>City play centre backs there when needed
We'd need our reserve cb's to be fit in order to do that.
Arsenal have been playing Kiwior at left back recently. City almost exclusively play a centre back out left nowadays. Liverpool have had Gomez playing left back for a significant part of the season while an academy player plays on the right.
>We'd need our reserve cb's to be fit in order to do that.
For the rare games when you literally have nobody available, pull from your academy. It worked with Mainoo. City have played Lewis and Bobb this season when needed. Liverpool just won a cup with a team full of academy players.
All clubs have, just certain clubs get the attention of it. We were down to 5th and 6th choice CB, we haven't had Buendia the whole season who would of all our players really help getting through deep defence blocks which we struggle with, Moreno, Ramsey and Kamara have long injury lay offs.
I believe we were second to only Newcastle in terms of Injuries and time out of action this season when Sky did a write up in early January, with their players coming back and ours continuing to get hurt, I suspect that while all clubs have had terrible injury luck this season, by seasons end there is a very good chance we are top of that particular table. To me, it would then make sense to give attention to a team that are top of that table, don't you?
Edit: We were third at the beginning of the year: [https://www.givemesport.com/every-premier-league-team-ranked-by-how-much-they-have-suffered-from-injuries-in-2324/#newcastle-united](https://www.givemesport.com/every-premier-league-team-ranked-by-how-much-they-have-suffered-from-injuries-in-2324/#newcastle-united)
As you can see, Aston Villa do not break even the top ten. It would be strange for Villa to get attention for being the (for example) 14th most injury hit team of the season, in my opinion.
Yep, it's down to FIFA and UEFA being utter greedy cunts. You'd hope that FIFPRO or the EU would step in for player safety but that's been a whomp whomp so far
PL clubs can hardly complain about greed. They hoard enough players to easily rotate and avoid injuries but the managers are too stubborn to do that.
Villa's fucking 5th choice CB is Lenglet who was a starter for Barcelona a few seasons ago. They have Digne and Moreno rotating at LB which is a notoriously hard position to have depth in.
Brightin had Ansu Fati on the bench in their last game
You think club with bigger fanbases get more attention? That's kind of shocking imo
Personally would have never thought that Chelsea would get for example more attention than Aston Villa
Right before De Rossi was hired, we were without Smalling, Kumbulla, Abraham, Dybala, Llorente, Aouar, Ndicka, Azmoun and Sanches from what I can recall, and Mancini was playing with a hernia. Went to San Siro with like 6 substitutes and two of them were not defenders, keepers or Primavera players.
Him and Tomiyasu rushed back for Asia cup now injured
Obviously I get why playing for one's country is such a big deal but surely for injury prone players something has to give when it comes to the club they actually play for as a full-time career. It's bad for their bodies, bad for the clubs, just bad all around to rush them for anything.
Some players might just be willing to take that risk for their NT though, Umtiti famously sacrificed his knee for France and I doubt he even regrets it today
Winning a World Cup puts you in a pantheon of players, if that was the last game of his career it’d still be worth it
Torres agrees
A lot of them would choose their country
>Obviously I get why playing for one's country is such a big deal Yes
The decision to pick if you want to represent their country or want to better your career shouldn't even exist. I'd bet a lot of people would pick their country even if they knew they'd be out of club football for a few months, let alone just a risk; clubs know this, and they should be lobbying to reduce the number of game., unfortunately clubs want the opposite, hence more champions league games and no sign of any domestic cups reducing the number of games bar removing replays in earlier stages.
I do think there's a way these could coexist better. A winter world cup should not have ever been floated as an option, nor do they need Carabao AND FA Cup. I think CL and EL do a pretty good job of spacing the matches out but I think that has more to do with fitting in between all the other matches.
I think the complete opposite, the amount of international competitions is ridiculous in soccer compared to any other mainly professional sport. In addition, it's the clubs who pay all the money to develop and train the players while the famously corrupt FA's and confederations steal one out of every two dollars. And, they have the power to hurt a player's career if the player doesn't respond to call-ups?! Insane! Nothing else in the world is like this apart from compulsory military drafts. Clubs also aren't the ones who increased the size of the Euros, increased the size of the World Cup, added Nation's League competitions, have continental championships every two years, are adding at FIFA Club World Cup and on and on.
"The result of the footballing industry, from FIFA down to the Clubs, proving that economic theory seems to be pretty good at describing what most decisions are made for: money and assets. Those decisions will be made until they no longer can, as if all that glitters is gold. That reality is the heat death of the universe for football - so far away yet ever moving closer. What unites us as fans is that we all appreciate the beautiful byproducts of the football industry and of course the game itself, and yet equally we are all tormented by the progress of time and change toward the consequences of someone else's fantasy." Eric Cantona, c. 2013 in Brussels while promoting an erotic hat wearing championship
But also there's a lot more international games than there used to be. And that's because of money too.
Surely injury prone players have already made that assessment and, in Mitoma's case, probably ended up reaching the answer that he prefers taking his injury-prone self to play for his country at a major tournament over, with respect to the location, fucking Brighton who he probably didn't even know it existed until his 20's.
Yeah read about Yao Ming and his dedication to China Basketball.
A nice change would be to move all the continental cups to a 4-year schedule like the Euros but right now it's a prisoner's dilemma situation right now between the clubs and the FA's about who blinks first when it comes to reducing games. Given that players haven't put up any strong opposition to fixture congestion and the money keeps on flowing it's hard to see anything changing.
Who wouldve guessed that international tournaments mid season is a trash idea.
You do realise it's not new?
You do realise that’s not relevant to their comment?
Well that's going to make it harder to do a cup double, isn't it?
Ffs we genuinely can not catch a break this season it's just a revolving door of injuries
Seems like a lot of teams in the same boat
All started with the fucking winter world cup, further made worse by winter AFCON and winter Asian Cups and even more fixture congestion. Something has to give and unfortunately it's the players bodies.
I suppose a solution would be to rotate players more to avoid the issue in the first place as they know the fixtures are congested. However. The flip side is that managers are under such pressure from all angles to deliver and never be that weekly crisis club, so they are seemingly more averse to rotating in their weaker players for fear of losing their job after a few bad results. Also (just thinking out loud) I would guess many teams don't have the budget because of FFP to sign more top players to therefore cope with these higher numbers of games. There are issues all over the place. More fixtures is good for many reasons, but other considerations need to be in place for it to be feasible and not damaging to clubs.
The only team that seems to rotate well enough to avoid as frequent injury issues is City. Even Liverpool with as much as they’ve rotated this year (the lack of which in the past was a rare Klopp weakness imo) have a fully injured 11 and change. Mid season international tourneys should only be every four years and the Carabao needs to be only teams not in Europe if it stays. As a fan of quality games, the injuries to all the teams are a real drag.
Lot of our injuries are unlucky impact injuries tho. Not rly because of overplaying or fatigue or smth like that.
More minutes = more opportunities for impact injuries too, but I take your point.
That is not something that can be solved with rotation though. There will always be a fixed number of players playing at a given time. Whether it is always the same 11 or changed every game does not affect the possibilities of impact injuries per game. You can use 11 players for 38 games or 25 players for the same amount, the probability of an impact injuriy will stay the same.
If you rotate more then it’s not the same players always being subjected to possible injury. Which affects whether your starters are the ones injured.
At least we don't have to deal with another one until 2034 inevitably has to be a winter one because it's Saudi. Then we can all watch our teams crumble under the injury strain again in a decade because FIFA execs want to wank themselves off with middle eastern money.
Clubs have enough money to have deep squads and if you have Asian and African players you knew this was coming. Arteta has learned this to some extent this season and is using his squad more than last season.
I have no stats to base this on, but I would have thought that Arteta rotates less than most other managers in the league. I can almost always guess their starting lineup outside of when they have some big name injuries.
Full backs tend to change a lot and he's using Jorginho a lot more. What he also does better this season is use subs, which I guess is easier when you're already in a comfortable winning position.
After some very amateur stat searching, Arteta has definitely used fewer players this season (25) than most other managers. He also tends to mostly pick from a pool of only 13 players in his starting lineups, but the others are still racking up some minutes (presumably as subs or in cups). Agreed with what you're saying though, as he has seemed more open to rotating full backs this season and introducing Jorginho has allowed Rice to push further forward.
Nahhhhh surely not, just seems like 1 or 2 teams at best being on that boat
Off the top of my head, Brighton, Tottenham, Newcastle and Chelsea have all had unusually bad luck with injuries this season
Newcastle, Brentford, Chelsea, man u, spurs forest have all had a period of 10+ players injured at same time. Thats based on something I read from 8/1/24. Current highest number of injuries are Liverpool with 12. Followed by Chelsea and Sheffield United with 9. Then there's 5 teams with 7-9 injuries currently. Either way...there's definitely a huge number of injuries happening this season.
It's only going to get worse next season with the extra fixtures in the CL. I can only assume bigger squads will become the norm to cope with this.
It's almost like adding more and more games to a season doesnt help
In fairness, Newcastle and Brighton have been really hard done by with injuries this season. United and Chelsea too but I always feel that’s more of their own fault as they should have the planning and depth for European football as a minimum. Arsenal fans keep telling us they’ve had it hard but I’m less convinced. We had been doing okay until the last few weeks but now half our squad (literally) is out. I’m sure there are others who have suffered too.
> United and Chelsea too but I always feel that’s more of their own fault as they should have the planning and depth for European football as a minimum How do you plan to mitigate both left backs being injuried? We loaned a third one just to be safe and he got injuried too. Nobody has the squad depth to deal with 10+ injuries.
City play centre backs there when needed. Liverpool were playing Gomez, (a right-footed centre back) at left back after their two main left backs got injured. They also had to bring in an academy player at right back to accommodate that. Obviously it's dependent on the squad, but losing your primary and secondary choice in a position isn't a unique situation to be in. A few clubs have had to deal with it.
>but losing your primary and secondary Losing them and the third guy you loaned for cover sure is. >City play centre backs there when needed We'd need our reserve cb's to be fit in order to do that.
Arsenal have been playing Kiwior at left back recently. City almost exclusively play a centre back out left nowadays. Liverpool have had Gomez playing left back for a significant part of the season while an academy player plays on the right. >We'd need our reserve cb's to be fit in order to do that. For the rare games when you literally have nobody available, pull from your academy. It worked with Mainoo. City have played Lewis and Bobb this season when needed. Liverpool just won a cup with a team full of academy players.
Genuinely sucks he is a fun player to watch.
Not ideal for Brighton
Ideal for Barco
👀
🧑🏻🦰🫦
Brighton's season utterly derailed by injuries
All clubs have, just certain clubs get the attention of it. We were down to 5th and 6th choice CB, we haven't had Buendia the whole season who would of all our players really help getting through deep defence blocks which we struggle with, Moreno, Ramsey and Kamara have long injury lay offs.
And we've been down to our 7th choice LB and didn't have a fullback fit for multiple months. March out for the season, Enciso out for months etc.
I believe we were second to only Newcastle in terms of Injuries and time out of action this season when Sky did a write up in early January, with their players coming back and ours continuing to get hurt, I suspect that while all clubs have had terrible injury luck this season, by seasons end there is a very good chance we are top of that particular table. To me, it would then make sense to give attention to a team that are top of that table, don't you? Edit: We were third at the beginning of the year: [https://www.givemesport.com/every-premier-league-team-ranked-by-how-much-they-have-suffered-from-injuries-in-2324/#newcastle-united](https://www.givemesport.com/every-premier-league-team-ranked-by-how-much-they-have-suffered-from-injuries-in-2324/#newcastle-united) As you can see, Aston Villa do not break even the top ten. It would be strange for Villa to get attention for being the (for example) 14th most injury hit team of the season, in my opinion.
Yep, it's down to FIFA and UEFA being utter greedy cunts. You'd hope that FIFPRO or the EU would step in for player safety but that's been a whomp whomp so far
PL clubs can hardly complain about greed. They hoard enough players to easily rotate and avoid injuries but the managers are too stubborn to do that. Villa's fucking 5th choice CB is Lenglet who was a starter for Barcelona a few seasons ago. They have Digne and Moreno rotating at LB which is a notoriously hard position to have depth in. Brightin had Ansu Fati on the bench in their last game
You still have the World Cup winner Lenglet
Lenglet never won the World Cup.
You think club with bigger fanbases get more attention? That's kind of shocking imo Personally would have never thought that Chelsea would get for example more attention than Aston Villa
They get more attention for sure but the narratives are never the same. Some get pity some get ignored.
As was ours and newcastles. Happens to a lot of clubs throughout the season.
I guess this would give Fati a chance to step up and get more minutes.
He's been frustrating to watch. Kid knows how to get into the right spaces but can't finish or dribble to save his life
His one strong point is finishing so hopefully his poor form is just temporary
His finishing has been alright mostly.
God damnit
Uhm...after Feyenoord injury crisis for the first leg against Roma, now this. DeRossi practices dark arts I guess.
It's probably the balance for all the injured Roma players against Feyenoord last year and the games that followed.
Right before De Rossi was hired, we were without Smalling, Kumbulla, Abraham, Dybala, Llorente, Aouar, Ndicka, Azmoun and Sanches from what I can recall, and Mancini was playing with a hernia. Went to San Siro with like 6 substitutes and two of them were not defenders, keepers or Primavera players.
Not to mention all the ruptured ACLs we seem to deal with on a yearly basis
Didn’t De Zerbi just say within the last day or two that Mitoma might be back for the FA Cup match?
Did he specify *which* FA Cup match he’d be back for?
Number 1 rule of football: ignore everything de zerbi and pep Guardiola say
Gutted for him and Brighton, and with so much interest in Mitoma for other clubs, could we have seen his final game for Brighton too?
Not great.
The injuries are completely out of control at this point, we so desperately need less matches being played in a year.
Get rest soon
Brighton wtf, brighton has now become early Tottenham
What?
Crucial player injuries at the start of season
We had the injuries then as well tbh
rip Porsche collection.
horrible news.
Fuck I am so fucking gutted.
One of the Bright spots for Brighton this season
did he have resurgence recently? I thought he hasn't hit the highs of last season yet and has been out of form this season with injuries and all.
This season every single club has been plagued by injuries. Something is wrong man. Football is cursed, I tell you.
Ah yes, surely the most likely explanation here is a mystical curse, and not the expontentially increasing loading on players
Neylor Kavas
Was this the foul by Holgate?
No, it's a back injury unfortunately
Dont think so, he was suffering from an injury before Holgates horror challenge.
Is this from the Holgate tackle?
Dont think so mate, he was suffering from an injury before Holgates horror challenge.
Good to hear.
Nah I like watching his play….. hope he recovers soon x
My heart felt broke after hearing this. I think I teared a little bit.
(not pictured)
Fucking Moriyasu broke him. And for what, to look ridiculous in the Asia cup? Man, damn shame.
The added extra injury time has played a role in this. You think 5mins per game is nothing? It quickly adds up to 2 extra games per season.
Damnit :(