Who’s next? A question that all potential World Cup footballers will ask as injuries accumulate and some very big names accept that they will miss what could have been one of the greatest moments of their career.
At more than one English Premier League club, and all over the world, there will be players under suspicion of saving themselves for the World Cup. As the number of club games spirals upwards, and the style of play leans towards ever more distance covered at greater intensity, then so the strain on players becomes much more pronounced.
It is estimated in some quarters that the policy in adding on every minute lost at the end of both halves, first implemented at the 2022 World Cup, has effectively added the equivalent of two extra 90-minute games to the season.
Xavi Simons, Rodrygo, Serge Gnabry and Hugo Ekitike are all confirmed out injured for the tournament in the United States among the big European-based names. So too many lesser lights all of whom had the potential to play a role. Brazil’s great teenage hope Estevao Willian may go to the United States by the skin of his teeth but he will do so having played very little in recent months. The same will be the case for his teammate Eder Militao. The same may well be the case for a long list of players in that grey area of open-ended absences caused by injuries about which details can be vague.
Lamine Yamal, Arda Guler, Thibaut Courtois, Mikel Merino, Luka Modric, Cristian Romero, Pape Matar Sarr, Ruben Dias, Reece James, Josko Gvardiol, Tino Livramento. All of them potential starters for their countries coming to the end of a gruelling club season with problems to consider. There is even a doubt over the participation of Lionel Messi, a question which has many layers to it, of which fitness will be crucial.
But Messi is 38 and can claim to have completed football. For many of these players – this is the big chance. Over history, there are many who have missed World Cups with injury. But never have the game’s elite been asked to play as much as they do now.
A World Cup is not necessarily won by the world’s strongest football nation – although sometimes that is the case. World Cups are won by national teams who can get it together for one eight-week window in a four-year cycle – fitness, ability, mentality, availability, spirit. That makes a great tournament team. You do not get many shots at it.
Which is why there will be many players secretly conserving their energy even as the club season reaches its crescendo. Some will play for nations who do not routinely qualify every time. Others will rationalise that when it comes to the day job there will be another title race next season, another tilt at the Champions League. By the time the 2030 World Cup finals come around the world will look very different for many footballers. They just won’t be the same as they are now.
They will also feel that no one is going to protect them from the demands of the club game – so they will have to do it themselves.
One can understand it. A lot of players recognise that their legacy in their home countries will be defined by what they do at a World Cup. Especially for the hundreds of elite players who do not play club football in their home country.
The demands of the club game are getting ever greater. James and Cole Palmer, as well as their many Chelsea international teammates, were playing until July 13 at last summer’s Club World Cup. The World Cup final in the same MetLife Stadium will take place six days after the one-year anniversary of that final last year. The Champions League is bigger, the games are longer. At some point, one has to make a decision.
“I learned in this country, after a day off, the team play better,” Pep Guardiola said last week. He said that when he arrived 10 years ago he leaned more towards a greater training workload but that his view had changed. Now he gives his players more time off and in that time they can do whatever they wish. “So long as they arrive Wednesday afternoon for training,” he said, “it is fine.”
That is the kind of freedom that only a very confident manager, certain in his ways and in his standing, can bestow. Perhaps it is not surprising that at this stage of the season when it is all on the line, many of Guardiola’s peers can go the other way. Which is to say, more running, more work, fewer days off. Anything to make the coach and his staff feel they have done all they can.
The players themselves seem to agree that international football is worth their best effort. It may not be of the same quality as the elite club game but it has a history and a set of limitations that make it that much more interesting. One can only select those who are available through nationality – and it should be the same for coaches, including the English Football Association and its habit of hiring expensive foreign managers. That restriction is international football’s strength, not its weakness. It is an expression of nationhood in the most benign way and it is always interesting. Not least how often teams at World Cups come to represent certain national characteristics, for better or for worse.
Which is why, even as all the focus is on title races and trophies, others will have their sights fixed further ahead. The great Ronaldo, the 2002 World Cup hero for Brazil, played just 16 games for Inter Milan in the 2001-02 season as he struggled with a chronic knee problem. That was 16 games more than he had played in 2000-01 which had been a total write-off. He had managed just eight in 1999-2000. But what most people remember of those three years is Brazil in the Far East in the summer of 2002 – and his part in it.
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