When Christian Pulisic, currently considered this country’s best soccer player, declined to play for the U.S. Men’s National team in the current CONCACAF Gold Cup and then engaged in a long-distance wars of words both with current national team coach Mauricio Pochettino and with Landon Donovan – who was American soccer’s GOAT before Pulisic – lots of people seemed to miss the point.
(And there was some severe irony hidden in that above paragraph. We’ll get to that.)
No, Pulisic is not being a prima donna. He is part of the collateral damage from a worldwide soccer calendar that has become too lengthy and too demanding, with too little thought given to the health of the players who people actually pay to see.
It is bad enough in this country’s domestic league, Major League Soccer. Beyond the 34-game regular-season schedule, teams participate in either the U.S. Open Cup tournament – an event that predates MLS by several decades – or the CONCACAF Champions Cup, to determine the sport’s regional champion.
To make it worse, MLS invented the Leagues Cup tournament, a competition with Liga MX teams that serves mainly to provide programming for Apple TV+ in July and August and otherwise only clutters a schedule that begins in late February and doesn’t end until mid-October. And the league’s best-of-three first-round playoff format, along with at least one international window in the fall, only serves to further drag the postseason into early December.
In 2023, the year after LAFC won its only MLS Cup to date, it played 53 games in 250 days, from its MLS opener on March 4 through the MLS Cup final in Columbus on Dec. 9. That included CONCACAF Champions League, U.S. Open Cup, Leagues Cup and Campeones Cup games, in addition to the regular season and playoffs.
But MLS players are lucky. At least they get an offseason, even if it’s only a little more than a month for the teams that make it to the championship round. For their counterparts elsewhere in the world, especially the stars who play for the high-profile teams that drive the sport’s conversation – and then report for national team duty – there’s essentially no such thing.
Consider Pulisic, whose day job is as AC Milan’s star. From last June 24 through this past May 24, Pulisic played 60 games, and 4,428 minutes, in 335 days, according to figures compiled by Transfermarkt. That included 50 matches for AC Milan between Serie A, the UEFA Champions League and two in-season Italian tournaments, and 10 matches for the USMNT (three Copa America matches, three exhibition matches and four in Nations League). And he missed most of December with a torn calf muscle and was hampered in March by another minor injury.
But his is not an unusual workload in this sport. Between league schedules, Champions League and other in-season tournaments and national team commitments, the stars are always expected to be on duty. And for the big European clubs, any summer time off is cut short by exhibition tours – often to the United States – for marketing purposes and, yes, for profit.
Now insert the Club World Cup, which is FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s baby and fits nicely with the organization’s apparent belief that more games and more money supersede everything else.
What was once a yearly seven-team December tournament to determine a world club champion – with the champions of Europe and South America drawing byes into the semifinals – is now a 32-team, month-long, big-money event, modeled after the World Cup, scheduled every four years and cutting into what would otherwise be the rest of the world’s offseason. FIFA established a $1 billion prize pool, and its attempt to recoup some of that money from gate receipts is running into a populace on these shores that, with a few exceptions, generally has been apathetic to this first-time event.
Complicating things here is that the CONCACAF Gold Cup is being played at the same time. Since the U.S. (along with co-hosts Mexico and Canada) qualifies automatically for next summer’s World Cup, this tournament and the friendlies surrounding it represent the closest thing the USMNT will have to preparation for the big tournament.
But the roster Pochettino is fielding is far from this country’s best. Pulisic isn’t the only absentee; Antonee Robinson and Yunus Musah have also declined to play because they need a break, Folarin Balogun and Sergiño Dest are battling injuries, and Gio Reyna, Weston McKennie and Timothy Weah are participating in the Club World Cup.
And it is interesting that Donovan criticized Pulisic for opting out, given that he himself took a self-described four-month “sabbatical” from soccer, skipping some World Cup qualifiers, after helping the Galaxy to the 2013 MLS Cup. Then-national team coach Jürgen Klinsmann left Donovan off the USMNT roster for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and late last year Klinsmann confirmed what we had all suspected at the time, that it was because Donovan had stepped away from the game for a while.
And the reason he did so? Mental and physical exhaustion.
FIFPRO, the global players’ association, was sounding this alarm four years ago before the 2022 World Cup in Qatar – which, incidentally, was played in December, in the middle of most of the world’s club seasons.
The situation has only gotten worse. This season, which for the leagues who play a traditional August-to-May schedule ends with the Club World Cup finale on July 13, is already considered the longest ever. International superstars such as Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappé and Jude Bellingham have voiced concerns, and as this season began other players raised the possibility of a future strike should the overload continue.
FIFPRO submitted a legal claim against FIFA a year ago, in conjunction with 26 European professional leagues, and among other points argued that “the new FIFA Club World Cup is seen by players and unions as representing a tipping point.”
At what point do players break down?
Manchester City’s Haaland understated it last summer: “It’s difficult to be sharp if you play over 70 games a year.” Not only is it difficult to be sharp, it’s challenging to just stay healthy.
But as long as the cash keeps flowing into the coffers, how do you get those in the executive suites to notice?
jalexander@scng.com
