Klopp, Pep & Virgil led the protest over scheduling so why is nothing been done?
Vincent Kompany wants a cap on appearances. Pep Guardiola has told players to take the fight to FIFA.
Jurgen Klopp is constantly aghast at fixture scheduling. Virgil van Dijk claimed that while ‘players are getting paid well, it should not come at the cost of our health’. Kevin De Bruyne branded new laws on extended additional time as nonsensical. Raphael Varane said the game has reached ‘a dangerous level’.
Why? Because more Premier League players are getting injured than ever before. It’s become a crisis.
‘It feels that now we’ve hit a critical point,’ says Tony Strudwick, the ex-Manchester United head of performance and now director of medical services at West Brom. ‘There is research suggesting that injuries costs Premier League teams around £45million per club for loss of earnings through position in the league. It’s a huge amount.
‘As an industry, you don’t want to sleepwalk into a situation that impacts the wellbeing of players but also the quality of the product. We want the best players out there every week.’
The finest midfielder in the country, De Bruyne, hasn’t been that for some time. A hamstring issue lasting months is a consequence of a lack of rest. Thirty five others had suffered similar injuries by the second international break of the season — a 125 per cent increase on last season’s 16, as numbers crunched by leading data analyst Ben Dinnery show, and a 90 per cent increase on the average of 19 over the last five seasons.
Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson unrolled a piece of A4 paper at a press conference last month which had a list of his injured players on it. He said he’d never known a crisis like it in all his years, and 400plus matches in Premier League management.
‘There are so many at the moment
Read on m.allfootballapp.com
