The International Champions Cup has been the last pre-season tournament to disappear from the football calendar. The seasons are more compressed than ever
What those idyllic pre-season times in Austria or Switzerland when teams like real Madridthey played against very low-level teams regardless of the result or the money obtained by the ‘bolo’. Two decades have passed since those times when winning the Ramón de Carranza trophy or the Teresa Herrera was a sign that the season of any club was going to go on rails. Now those championships, come to less, they are more of an obstacle in the calendar than a sign of tradition that gathered fans after going to the beach.
The calendars of the major leagues have been advanced to see the competitions begin on the dates reserved for those tournaments. On the other hand, both the Carranza and the Herrera have been threatened by the large exchanges that the ‘big’ they were admitted first by doing their preseason in exotic destinations such as the United States or Japan and that later mutated into tournaments that never found economic viability as the now defunct International Champions Cup demonstrated in its day. This championship played on North American soil saw Real Madrid win three editions, conceding a historic 3-7 win for the Whites against Atlético de Madrid and also Piqué’s famous ‘It stays’ with Neymar in 2017, among others highlights.
The pandemic, however, shattered a tournament that managed to bring together the leading teams in the Champions League, leaving many in the lurch this coming preseason. Only the teams of the super league they have managed to reorganize through the creation of the Soccer Champions Tour together with two Mexican teams. The rest of the leading clubs in Europe they are going to do various ‘bolos’ on their own trying to make the cache good of its players as announced by the Japanese tour of Paris Saint Germain or the pre-season in Southeast Asia by Liverpool.
In a summer where the World Cup in Qatar has been relocated to winter, football is perhaps also facing the most difficult preseason atypical. So much so that many great teams -for example, Atlético de Madrid- do not yet have a scheduled calendar and trophies such as the Herrera or the Carranza lack a confirmed line-up of clashes. We only know that the Premier will start on August 6 and that the League will do the same on August 13 when before everything started at the end of August or beginning of September. They are the consequences of the new football and that every day more each game is a business.