Players and leagues accuse Fifa of ‘abuse’ in landmark legal battle over football calendar

There should be something thrilling about Fifa’s idea for a quadrennial Club World Cup: another World Cup every fourth summer starring the biggest clubs all over the globe? It sounds like the Holy Grail of football tournaments. So it says a lot about the state of the game that the primary reactions have been apathy and anger. Fans want a break and so do the players.

“The problem will come when we finish the Club World Cup,” sighed Kevin De Bruyne last month. “We know there will only be three weeks between the Club World Cup final and the first day of the Premier League. You have three weeks to take a vacation, and prepare to play another 80 games ... They don’t care. It’s money that talks.”

On Monday, the global players’ association Fifpro sat beside Europe’s major leagues, including the Premier League, at the Residence Palace in Brussels to launch a joint legal action against Fifa. They accuse Fifa of acting unilaterally to push through the Club World Cup – set to take place in the US next June and July – without full consultation, squeezing every minute out of players for financial gain and acting in breach of European law.

“Fifa controls the international match calendar,” the group said at a press conference. “It abuses this power to expand its own competitions and increase its revenues. It pushes the players to their physical and mental limits.”

Fifa argues that the international calendar was approved by representatives of all continents after formal discussions, but Fifpro believes it has a strong case backed by recent court judgements such as the Lassana Diarra case last week, in which some of Fifa’s player transfer rules were found to be incompatible with EU law. There is a feeling within Fifpro that the ruling set a precedent for its own case by revealing how Fifa exploits its authority.

There is an absurdity at the heart of this story, in that Fifa is a non-profit organisation with a seemingly insatiable appetite for money. It raked in £5.8bn in its last four-year World Cup cycle between 2019 and 2022, up by more than a billion on the previous period despite the pandemic, and it has set an eye-watering target of £8.4bn for the current cycle. Fifa generates most of its income from selling World Cup TV rights on top of advertising, ticket sales, branding and licensing.

Fifa points to the way it distributes most of that money to national associations around the world to fund the game at all levels as a rip-roaring success story. A cynic might suggest that president Gianni Infantino’s power is built on the votes of national associations, who rely on his handouts. The Club World Cup is understood to be a personal mission of the president.

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It is hard to sympathise with an organisation whose “corruption” section on Wikipedia is longer than this article, but Fifa has accused the leagues of hypocrisy, and here it has a point. After all, Premier League clubs send their players to far-flung destinations on travel-intensive tours each preseason. Hours after last season finished, Newcastle and Tottenham sent their squads halfway around the world for a bizarre friendly at Melbourne Cricket Ground. The Premier League itself launched its new Summer Series last year, with six clubs playing nine matches across eight days in various US cities. So when the Premier League complains to Fifa about respecting player welfare, it is hard to see it as anything other than a rock thrown from inside its own lavish glass house.

Uefa is piling fixtures onto players’ overflowing plates too, with its newly expanded Champions League. The format provoked criticism and threats from a number of high-profile players, including Liverpool’s Alisson Becker, Barcelona’s Jules Kounde and Manchester City’s Rodri, who warned last month: “There will come a time when we will have to go on strike.” Almost as if to underline the point, Rodri suffered a season-ending ACL injury a few days later.

But the Club World Cup is the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Fifpro says Fifa’s lack of dialogue is what ultimately provoked legal action. Fifpro wants to see mandated breaks of three to four weeks every summer, giving players guaranteed time to switch off and refresh. And it wants Fifa to start using its power for the good of the players, not just the game’s revenues.

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It is a case that gets to the very heart of Fifa’s purpose. Is it a custodian of the game, a keeper of the keys? Or is it a player on the pitch competing for space? There is no overarching regulator of the football calendar, and Fifpro and the leagues say Fifa must bring the entire church together to protect players, as well as the quality of the product.

As the European Leagues’ Alberto Colombo said: “It’s a collective responsibility – the players, leagues, national associations, governing bodies and, of course, the fans. And the fans’ position on this is quite clear: we don’t want more matches, we want better matches.”

It is an unprecedented situation in which players are increasingly voicing their frustrations and the leagues are fighting to defend their territory in the calendar. Premier League CEO Richard Masters said in the complainants’ statement: “It is getting to a tipping point. The feedback we have from players is that there is too much football being played and there is constant expansion.”

Players insist that strike action is a last resort. But legal action could be just the start of a battle for the future of football, and who gets to shape it.