A few days ago, Raphael Varane resigned from France’s national team. Now he has justified his decision – and criticized the schedule in professional football.
“Football at the highest level is like a washing machine, you play all the time and you never stop”Varane told the French TV channel Canal Plus on Sunday (05.02.2023). “Right now I feel a bit like suffocating.”
Varane, 29, has been a professional soccer player for twelve and a half years and has been under contract with Manchester United for a year and a half. He has won 20 titles and played 505 competitive games in his career. He became world champion with France, that was in 2018. And with Real Madrid he won the Champions League four times.
Interviews are part of the job for someone like Varane, and he’s given a few. But this one was different, you won’t soon forget it.
Varane says: “I’m there without being there”
A few days earlier, Varane had surprisingly announced his retirement from the French national team after 93 international matches in ten years. And now he sat in front of the Canal Plus camera and explained why he no longer wanted to play for France.
He didn’t talk about frustration after losing the World Cup final in December, nor did he complain about decisions made by national coach Didier Deschamps. Varane was concerned with the schedule of a professional footballer and breaks, of which he believes there are too few. He said: “The player devours the human. I am there without being there.”
Gundogan and Courtois have been critical
Varane is not alone in his criticism of the appointment calendar. It’s the players of top European clubs who are complaining. They are concerned with international trips and also with the reform of the Champions League, they will increase the number of games again from 2024. Ilkay Gündogan, for example, criticized the reform plans in April 2021. He wrote on Twitter: “More and more and more games, doesn’t anyone think about us players?”
Goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois doesn’t like this development either. In the days before he was due to play Belgium’s third-place finisher in the Nations League in October 2021, Courtois has criticized UEFA for the match schedule. “There are more and more games and less and less rest for us”he said. “We are not robots.”
FIFPRO complains about “overload”
FIFPRO, the international players’ union, is also among the critics. There they observe the stresses in women’s and men’s football with some concern. So they are also committed to a game calendar that is intended to protect footballers from the “physical, mental and social effects” of overexertion. It’s not the UEFA and FIFA calendar.
The FIFPRO Secretary General Jonas Baer-Hoffmann once told DW: “Today’s amount of games puts too much strain on the mental and physical well-being of the players.” That was half a year before the men’s World Cup in Qatar, but he will hardly have revised his opinion.
FIFPRO issued a report ahead of the tournament. The players’ union says it polled over a thousand footballers from England, France, Italy and Spain. And that 55 percent of those surveyed spoke of injuries that they attributed to overexertion. Almost 40 percent of those surveyed said that the requirements put a strain on their mental health.
Because the World Cup took place in winter, many European leagues had scheduled a longer break for this period. Previously, however, many games had often taken place in a very short time. FIFPRO has calculated that the preparation and recovery time of some players representing their country at the World Cup was four times shorter than usual.
Short break, especially for Premier League players
And it’s true, you can see that in the Premier League – it’s the league in which Raphael Varane also plays. It’s an extreme example – a winter World Cup and a league that doesn’t have a winter break don’t mix. There were only seven days between the last Premier League match day and the opening game of the World Cup. And there were only nine days between the World Cup final and the following Premier League matchday.
Varane had injured his leg in the weeks leading up to the World Cup finals. He arrived in Qatar ailing and was only on the bench in the first game. But then Varane always played, he was in the starting eleven in all six games, a total of 521 minutes. In the final he played until the 113th minute – and nine days later he was back in the starting line-up for Manchester United.
Well, when giving the interview to Canal Plus, Varane said: “We play all the time, we never stop.” But that wasn’t quite right. Varane has stopped, at least a little.