Exhaustion spreads through the Premier League as packed schedule takes its toll

After a year when the global pandemic altered the schedule of English soccer, the fatigue is now taking a bigger toll.

Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne is feeling the effects of the packed schedule

Kevin De Bruyne was still catching his breath after Manchester City’s win over Chelsea this week when he brought up English soccer’s favourite topic of conversation and consternation: the relentless schedule.

“It’s going to be difficult,” he said, looking ahead. “We know we have to play another eight or nine games in January.”

The number is more like seven games in the space of 24 days, but that’s no less insane. After a year when the global pandemic altered the schedule of English soccer — extending the 2019-20 campaign into late July before a new season began in mid-September — the fatigue is now taking a bigger toll. It is changing the way teams actually play.

The effects are plain to see in the standings. Nearly halfway through the season, only seven points separate the top 10 teams, from Liverpool to West Ham. Everyone has at least two defeats.

The title is on pace to be won with 78 points, the lowest total since 1998. The idea that the past three champions each posted at least 98 points now seems as quaintly pre-pandemic as sold-out 50,000-seat stadiums and victory parades.

The biggest culprit is the 2020-21 calendar. The Premier League played into the summer, paused for cursory pre-season training, and kicked off again in September, a month later than usual. Yet it still plans to finish on May 23, meaning that the 38-game schedule had to be squeezed into barely nine months instead of 10.

“After the short break, we weren’t ready mentally or physically,” De Bruyne said.

It didn’t take long for managers to realise that the furious pace they were used to simply wasn’t feasible anymore. It’s as if their squads of Ferraris were suddenly fitted with diesel engines. And nowhere is that clearer than in the way teams press.

If high flyers such as Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool had taught the Premier League anything over the past five years, it was that frantic pressing to create turnovers high up the field was an effective way to generate more attack. The tactic requires a level of stamina that few teams can maintain for entire games. But by last season, it was so entrenched in English soccer that even clubs fighting relegation saw it as their best bet to stay up.

In the first full season of the pandemic, however, the busiest pressing team in the league would qualify as half-asleep by last year’s frenzied standards. Leeds currently ranks first in pressures with 157 per 90 minutes, according to FBref.com, which tracks advanced soccer metrics. In 2019-20, that number would be good enough for 14th.

Even Liverpool, which revolutionised the role of strikers by honing their ability to win back possession, is backing off. Though it still leads the league in pressures in the attacking third of the field, the team is doing it 12 per cent less often.

It’s no accident that Liverpool’s forwards seem to be easier to wrangle these days either. Monday’s sputtering performance in a 1-0 defeat at Southampton saw the club fail to register a single shot on goal until the second half. Liverpool has scored just once in three games since Christmas Day.

“Starting slowly in games is not us,” midfielder Jordan Henderson said.

It might have been more accurate to say “not just us”. Exhaustion has spread through English soccer and around Europe’s top divisions, which are playing similarly compressed schedules. In the Germany Bundesliga, the original home of high-pressing soccer, teams freely admit that they have changed their style of play to account for the more crushing demands on player fitness. With muscular injuries on the rise, clubs say they have no choice.

“We play intense, but more controlled,” Simon Rolfes, the sporting director of Bayer Leverkusen, said recently. “Controlling games helps to prevent injury.”

That means more ball possession where possible, slowing down the passing game, and, in defence, less frantic pressing. Approaches have also changed outside of games. Training at most clubs has turned into little more than recovery work — short sessions that go light on contact and heavy on casual drills. In the Premier League, where a packed schedule over the year-end holidays is sacrosanct, it’s the only way to survive.

Where German clubs have done their players more favours than their counterparts in England, however, is on the substitutes bench. The Bundesliga — along with France’s Ligue 1 and Spain’s La Liga — voted to extend a rule that allowed managers to make five changes during matches instead of the normal three. The Premier League, which tested it in 2019-20, chose not to use five substitutes again after several teams argued that it only favoured rich clubs with the deepest benches.

All of which leaves English soccer’s title race limping into 2021 with flagging squads and a schedule that has virtually no wiggle room. The already packed calendar is at a breaking point after three matches were postponed last week due to positive COVID-19 tests with a high risk for more as cases surge in the UK.

The Premier League on Tuesday reported 40 new cases from 2295 players and staff, more than twice as many as in the previous round of testing.

“You can see all over Europe the big teams are struggling,” Manchester City midfielder Ilkay Gundogan said before the run of holiday games. “We are human beings, not machines, we struggle as well.”

Wall Street Journal