General Discussion

I mean... it is the fans who are watching and attending those matches.

I seem to remember Sir Alex refusing to register Manchester United in the FA Cup because there were too many matches. I don't remember how it was resolved.

It's never happening

The issue is that the managers and players only mention it as a problem when it affects THEM, and then when they don't get in trouble over it, they join the counter-choire of "it's not a problem for us, so they should just man up and kick on". Then the lack of memory beyond the last 3 months, and oh yeah MONEY. Also, the effect these excessive matches have on different clubs is very uneven. A club that goes all the way in cups will suffer greatly, where as a club that does not will usually just have a match a week and not give a damn...

Money. Lots and lots of money. They all bath in it.

More matches more time to experiment with additional squad players and rest key players against lesser known teams, release them on loans and make MONEY save on wages.

Repeat.

Emi Martinez was a loan player most of his life and just had enough loan spells.

Emi Martinez loans spells.

As a fan, I don't think there are too many matches. It's kind of like being a manual laborer and complaining that working HARD 35 days per year is too much because of the other 150 days of light (ie practice) work you do on top of that.

At least footballers get paid an amount of money to make the effort worth it.

money.

just look at the crazy amount of added time being added to each half. they only care about money.

do footballers have unions in different leagues?

Messi will choke them if they try to riot

It's not that I don't believe them when they say it's too many games. However I still don't understand why teams don't simply ignore the league cup matches in their entirety and just send their u23s + their coaching staff to those games, while keeping their 20 to 25 core players + manager at home. Or even better: scheduling recovery/tactical sessions during league cup nights

Surely the FA will take notice when teams just say "fuck it" like that. Are there rules in place to prohibit this?

I mean Guardiola mooted that a player strike might happen on this issue about a month ago. It was certainly an issue in the last pfa election https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/59347490.amp

I suspect the problem is ultimately for competitive animals - which the top players are. Refusing the opportunity to play goes against their nature. All players are drilled to seek out and seize opportunities for first team football. You don’t make it out of the academy (and the majority of people don’t make it as pro footballers) to the first team if you don’t have an insanely professional mentality and strive to play every minute you can. A lot of players would fear being dropped permanently if they asked managers for rest or getting benched by a sub or rotation option impressing when called upon. Pep himself has said he has to rotate purely to keep players happy with their minutes. Zidane spoke about how difficult it was to convince Cristiano Ronaldo to sit on the bench even if it was obvious that as a guy in his mid 30s his career would be longer and better if he missed the odd game where he wasn’t needed like a copa del rey tie vs a 3rd division side or a UCL group stage dead rubber.

This factors into the other issue. It affects such a small proportion of the players. The vast majority of professional players play outside the top leagues and top divisions and therefore don’t play anything other than league and cup games and don’t get called up in international breaks. Even in the premier league the majority of teams don’t play European football, even amongst those who do play in Europe there’s no guarantee they go all the way to the final every year. Even on the teams who can guarantee that (basically just Man City) they have a deep bench and rotate - Haaland and Rodri are the only guys who play every game for their club and their country when fit. For the majority of players who the unions represent they want more game time not less. There are far more players in the situation of (picks random cb) James Tomkins who plays every now and then for Crystal Palace so is rarely playing midweek and always has the international breaks off than Virgil Van Dijk (in the same position) who plays pretty much every game as Liverpool captain regularly making deep runs in both cups and Europe every season so playing multiple midweek matches and captaining the Netherlands every international break and 2 summer tournaments in a row.

Most players have Tomkins match load not Van dijks

I can't speak for eveyone butnas a fan, I typically like watching my team so I don't want to see a reduction in fixtures. If anything I would like to see more but we keep losing games and our most prestigious trophy is the Watney Cup.

There would seem to be one obvious solution that I haven't heard people talking about.

More games means more money.

More money could mean more ability to pay players.

Solution - use the money to increase squad sizes, allow greater rotation of players to rest, ask football associations to increase the number of players that can be registered to play