The calendar keeps filling, and the players keep running. Somewhere in the distance, a boarding gate for another season tour is already opening. With more tournaments, broadcast deals, and more money than ever before, the game looks richer than ever from the outside. But, inside the dressing rooms and training grounds, a crisis is quietly taking shape: every year, a new competition is added and a player is carried off.
THE ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE
The financial logic behind calendar expansion is simple: more games mean more broadcast deals, sponsorship revenue, and larger global audiences, as seen in the expansion of the UEFA Champions League to 189 matches and the creation of FIFA’s new 32-team Club World Cup, for example. But, the deeper you look, the economic picture becomes more complex.
Insurance premiums for injured players have risen steadily, medical staffs have expanded, rehabilitation facilities are increasingly becoming essential infrastructure, rather than luxuries. For clubs outside the very elite, the costs of competing in an inflated calendar often outpace the additional revenues they receive.
For example, Auckland City FC illustrates the disparity. The New Zealand amateur club earned an estimated USD 4.6 million payout from the 2025 Club World Cup, and while that figure looks good on paper, it obscures the hidden costs the headline number doesn’t capture: intercontinental travel for a squad whose players handle many jobs at once, such as barbers, advertising executives and trainee teachers,.
Transfer markets have also been affected, as the physical toll of overwork increasingly shapes how clubs assess player value. This reduces the long term value of players while simultaneously inflating short-term wages to compensate for the shortened career expectations players themselves now factor in, and the cycle continues.
There is also the question of competitive balance, which underpins the entire commercial model of professional football. The leagues and competitions are valuable precisely because the outcomes feel uncertain. But, when elite clubs use the expanded calendar to monopolize broadcast revenues while simultaneously absorbing injury costs, the competitive gap between rich and poor clubs.
THE MENTAL COST
A 2024 FIFPro study found that players competing in 55+ matches per season showed anxiety and emotional exhaustion markers at rates more than double those seen in players who played less, and these patterns persisted into the following pre-season, suggesting the recovery deficit compounds year over year. Jude Bellingham, who plays for Real Madrid, described the toll directly: “It’s so tough with crazy schedules,” he said. “It’s difficult on the body, mentally and physically you are exhausted.”
The concept of burnout in elite sports is not new, but its strong presence in professional football represents a significant escalation. Burnout in this context is not only fatigue, but also a sustained state of physical, emotional, and motivational depletion that reduces performance and increases the likelihood of mistakes, and in some documented cases, leads to early retirement or prolonged absence from the sport entirely.
Football players, like most high-performing athletes, are driven partly by intrinsic motivation, but when no single game feels particularly consequential because another is waiting just a few days later, the psychological weight of each individual contest diminishes and when more frequently a reward occurs, the less it registers emotionally.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
The uncomfortable reality is that almost everyone with the power to change the calendar has a financial incentive not to.
It’s important to recognize that these organizations offer their own justifications for the expanding calendars and formats. FIFA argues that a higher number of tournaments broadens access to top level football for smaller federations, generating revenue that gets redistributed toward developing the sport globally.
Besides, UEFA contends that an expanded Champions League delivers more competitive matches between elite clubs, meeting audience demand for fixtures. Broadcasters justify their growing investments by pointing to the volume of content they can offer subscribers, while sponsors see expansion as an opportunity to increase brand exposure to global audiences.
This is what economists sometimes call a collective action problem: every individual actor behaving rationally in their own interest produces an outcome that is irrational for the group as a whole. Each club signs the broadcast deal, accepts the tournament slot, and fields the exhausted squad, because not doing so means losing money.
Some European leagues have begun restricting double headers for clubs during congested periods, other clubs have quietly begun rotating squads more aggressively, sacrificing domestic cup runs to preserve their players for the main games. That said, these are individual adaptations to a systemic problem, and they do not solve the actual problem.
Modern football has built itself into a corner. It is generating more money than at any point in its history, while placing increasing strain on the physical and psychological health of its players, who make all of that money possible.
A sport whose stars cannot recover, cannot rest, and increasingly report that they cannot fully enjoy what they do is a sport that is, slowly, eating itself.
The central question is whether those with the power to change it are willing to act before the damage becomes irreversible, or whether it will take a generation of early retirements and mental health crises.
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The article above was edited by Ana Rita Rodrigues Fernandes.
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