Are we living in a time when there’s too much football than any fan could possibly need?
It’s over. It’s all over. A second unique season in a row is in the books. There will finally be a break in football… for two days until the Europa League final. Two days after that, the Champions League final will be settled. Then a real break of two weeks until the monthlong Euros—no break if you are interested in the pre-tournament international friendlies. Less than 24 hours ago, most of European football had its final weekend of domestic league competition. Even before the weekend on Friday, Levante faced Cádiz to kick off the final weekend of La Liga. Lower in the divisions, Toulouse took on Grenoble in the Ligue 1 Relegation/Promotion Playoffs and Blackpool hosted Oxford United in the League One Playoffs. Friday’s matches were the appetizers for the big buffet of football we’d be getting on Saturday and Sunday—the free peanuts you snack on in the lobby before the endless options awaiting you on the buffet floor. The $12 bread knots you mistakenly order at the expensive Italian restaurant thinking they were free. Okay that last one doesn’t technically apply and it might just have been a personal experience I had to get off my chest.
From Friday to Sunday, 49 matches were played across Europe’s top five leagues alone. This past weekend’s matches were not for nothing either—a lot was at stake. Atlético Madrid won La Liga and Lille won Ligue 1 (a neutral’s victory). Going into the weekend, only the Premier League and Serie A had determined their relegation victims. European competition spots had yet to be decided in all of the top five leagues. Juventus avoided further sliding into a neutral’s most welcome disarray by securing Champions League football next season (you win this time Andrea Agnelli). By points total, goal differential, or head-to-head, at least a third of these matches affected the landscape of a certain club’s 2021-22 season. I even created a semi-organized list of matches to watch, or at least keep an eye on this weekend, sorted by day and time.
While creating this list, I had a thought. This is a lot of football. There has been a lot of football. Let’s take a look at the Premier League for example.
The 2020-21 season started a month later in the year than usual due to the late conclusion of the historic (for a particular viral reason) 2019-20. The standard 380 matches were played across 8.5 months—a span two weeks shorter than the usual 9 months. You may think “it’s only two fewer weeks”, but due to cup reschedules and health and safety protocol reschedules, May’s been loaded with matches. In the pursuit to finish the season before June, the Premier League, and other domestic leagues across Europe, crammed as many matches as they needed in the final month of the season. Soaking in the praise of a safe return to football, league offices smiled at their work until they looked up at the clock and realized their final paper of the semester was due in only a few hours and they were far from the word count requirement. By dinnertime on Sunday in the UK, there had been 51 Premier League matches played in 23 days. If we consider an average month having four weekends, that’s 40 matches in a month. Now, let’s zoom out and take a brief look at Europe. In the span of May 1st to May 23rd, May 20th was the only day there wasn’t a top 5 domestic league game or UEFA competition game. Ain’t that something?
“Constant, dizzying, 24-hour, yearlong, endless football!” A quote from one of my favourite That Mitchell and Webb Look sketches. I love the sketch because it’s such an accurate portrayal of weekends for football fans, especially if you follow more than one league. It also feels like every Sky Sports advert I’ve seen previewing a weekend’s matches. Admittedly I haven’t seen many, so maybe you can vouch for my observation. I’ve gone back and watched the sketch a lot these past 12 months because of how real it is. It’s football, football, football! I’ve watched more football these past 12 months than I ever have in my life. I mean yeah, there hasn’t been much to do considering going to see your friend could kill your grandparents, but I definitely could’ve spent more time on other things. Things like say… writing about football. Oh dear…
This is not to say I haven’t enjoyed watching football. When the first Bundesliga match post-moratorium was announced for May 16th last year, I marked it in my calendar and counted down the days. Football was returning! I vowed I would never take football for granted. I told myself and my friends that I’d be watching all the Bundesliga. I’d become a Bundesliga fan. Hell if it came to it, I’d become the Bundesliga. I diligently watched Borussia Dortmund, the German club I have leanings towards (more on them another time), put a half-hearted effort at toppling the Bavarian giants in Munich. I studied Union Berlin’s fantastic first ever season in the top flight. I gasped at Werder Bremen’s descent into the relegation playoffs and applauded Fortuna Düsseldorf and Paderborn’s valiant efforts to stay up. I watched games from the morning into the afternoon, both Saturday and Sunday, and two weeks later I stopped. I was exhausted from the constant football. I fell asleep a few times having gone to bed late the night before only to watch a 0-0 stalemate the next morning. It was not normal for someone to watch 4-5 football matches in a week, let alone in a single weekend. Not unless they’re being paid to talk or write about football (ahem I am certainly free to be hired).
I burned out quickly from football’s return. I ate too much, too quickly when I’ve been starving all day, only to eat less than I usually can because I shovelled everything down all at once. Even when the league I follow the most, the Premier League, returned, the games started to come thick and fast quite soon. My attempts to once again watch as much football as possible failed and I reverted back to my usual consumption of the weekly Manchester United game and maybe another league game and a half. Throw in midweek European competitions every few weeks and I was more than stuffed.
From the first Bundesliga game back on May 16th, 2020 to the Euro 2020 final on July 11th, 2021, there will have been only roughly nine weeks of break for The Football. Roughly seven weeks between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 domestic seasons and roughly two weeks between the 2020-21 domestic seasons and Euro 2020. Safe to say that’s a lot of football in not a lot of time. As a fan, I only need a week off to reset my mind and get things sorted (finally organized some of my vinyl). I’m even granted boring international breaks filled with meaningless friendlies as a quasi-break shall my footballing curiosity allow it. As a top footballer though, nine weeks off (keep in mind not all at once) in 13-14 months is rough.
The greatest concern with this continuous amount of football lies in the ones who make it happen—positions 1 through 11 on the pitch. It seems that as players and managers are asking to play fewer games, governing bodies are forcing even more games to be played in shorter spans of time. With the Europa Conference League—whatever that is—next season, a batch of clubs will be adding a whole other set of midweek matches to their fixture list. Europa Conference League next season, Europa Division League when? How long until we see Alexis Sánchez and Son Heung-min’s yearlong seasons of the past become normalcy? Flying from domestic competition country, to European competition country, to international competition country. Going forward and back through time zones on flight after flight. Even a rubber balloon will burst if it’s filled with too much water.
During a time when life is slowing down for the entire world, the football is coming faster than ever. Aren’t we supposed to have a hard reset on life? To analyse ourselves introspectively? Did we not realize that we were taking on life at a pace that was unsustainable and unhealthy? The cynic in me (very prominent these days) says it’s the nature of modern football. The sport is now a commercial sector. Of course people like you and I still love football, and the allure and spectacle of it, but on a grander level it’s all just a business isn’t it? I mean, why else would 12 of the commercially most powerful clubs in the world attempt a coup to steal the beautiful game from us?
The optimist in me (not very prominent these days) says maybe at this moment, things are speeding up in alignment with the world’s gradual return to regular life as we knew it. A regular life of consumerism. I’ll be the first to admit that even though I believe football is churning out at an alarming rate, I go two weeks without football and I’m crying out for its return. Come late July, I’ll be thinking weekends are awfully weird without constant football. As fans we want as much football as there can be even though we won’t care for most of it. We want to have it all, but don’t want to watch it all. To take it back to the buffett analogy I started with—we want the buffet to have limitless options even though there’s no way we can have everything. Hell, we probably don’t even care for half of the options (who goes to a buffet for chicken nuggets and fries?), but we’d be disappointed nonetheless if those options were removed from the buffet floor (even I have cravings too).
I am of the belief that this pandemic, as devastating as it has been, has made the world slow down and seriously evaluate our priorities in life. We’ve been forced to take things one step at a time and actually enjoy every phase in our daily lives. From the small things like making breakfast to the big things like seeing a relative. I think football should do the same. Decrease the denominator to increase the quotient.
Two big finals before next Sunday, and then we can take a deep breath before the rush of the Euros. Well, I’ll be focusing on hoping Toronto FC actually do something this MLS season. So maybe you just take two weeks off. But hey, do as I say, not as I do.
The Utility Spot 