Three days after the end of the Premier League season on May 19, two of its clubs, Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United, will meet in a friendly at the 100,000-capacity Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Tottenham and their head coach Ange Postecoglou, who began his playing and management careers in Melbourne, will then fly the 10,000 miles (16,000km) back to the UK afterwards — but Newcastle will stay to play a second friendly there, meeting the domestic A-League’s All-Stars select side two days later at the city’s 53,000-seat Docklands Stadium.
Including pre-season last summer, those will be Newcastle’s 59th and 60th matches of 2023-24, and game 46 for Spurs.
For Bruno Guimaraes, they would be his 63rd and 64th appearances, if he features in Newcastle’s 10 remaining Premier League fixtures and both Brazil’s friendlies against England and Spain over the next week — and he potentially has the Copa America to come in the United States starting on June 21, where he could play for his country another six times. With the game taking place outside the official international window, those involved in the European Championship or Copa America tournaments this summer will be expected to travel.
On the face of it, there is plenty wrong with this. There are player-welfare concerns and even environmental ones, with campaigners questioning the length of the flights involved for such a short tour.
However, this is a landscape dominated by a different type of sustainability — yes, it’s the profit and sustainability rules (PSR), the doorman barring or allowing entry to the Premier League elite. These restrictions only permit clubs to make a certain financial loss over a rolling three-year period, leaving the league’s high-flyers and hopefuls alike scrapping to grow their revenue.
This is why post-season tours overseas are not unique to Tottenham, Newcastle and this summer — they have been common among ‘Big Six’ clubs over the past decade — but neither side this time has hidden how this trip is motivated by commercial rather than sporting reasons.
Another thing that isn’t unique? Managers raising workload concerns.
Here is Postecoglou, speaking in January about the usefulness of the Premier League’s two-week winter break: “The concern is the load players have to carry these days in the number of games, tournaments, representative football they have to play. We should be coming up with a calendar that allows them to play at their best without too much attrition from a physical perspective.”
This is Eddie Howe, his Newcastle counterpart, speaking amid an injury crisis this season that left him with 11 first-team players out simultaneously: “ When you have the number of injuries we have had, some of those have come from too much load.” On Wednesday, news emerged of centre-back Sven Botman’s knee surgery, who had previously opted to push through a packed fixture schedule to help the team.
In June, FIFPro, the global footballers’ union, released a report entitled Extreme Calendar Congestion: The Adverse Effects On Player Health And Wellbeing.
Some of its statistics were galling — Uruguay international Giorgian de Arrascaeta had travelled 84,791km for matches (that is two full laps of the globe); 43 per cent of World Cup players surveyed had experienced extreme mental fatigue; elite players could soon play towards 90 matches over a 12-month period. The previous year, another FIFPro survey saw 55 per cent of players claim they had picked up an injury directly due to scheduling.
“It’s easy to look ahead and see a situation where elite players face a 12-month rolling calendar,” a spokesperson for the Professional Footballers’ Association, the player trade union in the English game, tells The Athletic. “That’s completely unsustainable. For a lot of players, the idea of defined seasons has been lost. They just move from one competition or commitment to another, shifting between international and club football as required.”
Clubs insist they are experts in player transport — flying them around in first- or business-class, with strategies to combat jet lag, and hydration and muscular issues — but these are all mitigating factors, not solutions. Two flights of 24 hours duration within a week is not good for an athlete’s body, however comfortable and roomy their seat on the plane, and there is a clear difference between flying somewhere for one or two exhibition games then returning and going for a full pre-season, where players will spend multiple weeks in the far-flung destination.
All those factors do not carry as much weight as the potential commercial income.
There are other reasons these matches may be considered exciting — Postecoglou’s return to hometown Melbourne (his family moved there from Greece when he was five years old) is a feel-good story, and both clubs have large and loyal fan groups in Australia, who have endured many bleary-eyed years of late-night sports bars and early-morning wake-ups to watch their team play. For them, these matches are deserved.
The same is equally true for clubs’ fanbases in countries that may not boast the same commercial clout — international fans in South America, Africa, or the Philippines — and who are not ‘rewarded’ in this way. When there is no revenue available, clubs are hyper-vigilant of player workload. Journalists waiting in mixed zones for players post-match, only to be told recovery takes precedence, know this all too well.
Tottenham, in particular, see Australia as a huge opportunity.
Their current head coach’s nationality provides the opportunity to follow their Son Heung-min-centric commercial growth in South Korea, having toured their current captain’s homeland in the 2022-23 pre-season. Australia is their fourth biggest market for retail sales, and their eighth largest when it comes to official supporters’ clubs. One of these, OzSpurs, has been going for more than two decades, with 700 paid members, a social media community of more than 10,000 and chapters in every major city.
A giant Spurs-themed mural featuring Postecoglou, Son and team-mate Richarlison adorns a wall in Perth, 9,000 miles away from the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
What a sight 😍
Our squad pose in front of Perth’s latest mural, symbolising community, our journey to Boorloo/Perth and the ancient wetlands of Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar.
🎨 Painted in collaboration with First Nations artist JD Penangke as she shares her cultural connection with… pic.twitter.com/IIPz2GpF9b
— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) July 17, 2023
Newcastle, for their part, see their invitation to compete as a mark of their progress. Had results been different in last weekend’s FA Cup quarter-finals, it would have been Chelsea making this trip, not them.
Despite being majority owned by football’s richest investors, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, those PSR rules effectively block Newcastle from spending big and even present the possibility of them needing to sell one of their prize assets, such as Guimaraes, this summer.
Australian supporters expect to see the teams’ stars but their fitness and availability for the matches in Melbourne are not guaranteed.
Commercially though, their presence is vital. Last month, the Hong Kong government said it was “extremely disappointed” by Lionel Messi’s failure to play for his MLS team Inter Miami during a friendly in their country, demanding an answer from the match’s organisers. After sitting on the touchline in front of thousands of booing fans, Messi issued a social-media apology within days.
There are further reasons for some of the best players to be absent — Copa America and the European Championship both begin less than a month later. Between them, Newcastle and Spurs have 29 players with a chance of being picked by their country for either tournament. But again, both clubs will expect these individuals to make the trip, with the matches taking place outside of FIFA’s international windows.
England’s Football Association did not wish to comment on whether it would approach the teams to discuss whether England squad members would travel.
Several aspects of the situation are farcical: a number of players face an unnecessary round-the-world trip to begin the biggest summer of their careers; Newcastle quartet Fabian Schar, Dan Burn, Miguel Almiron and Sean Longstaff — who will all likely have played about 50 games this season by then — are ultimately going to be shipped to Melbourne for the primary purpose of helping the club earn the money to sign their replacements.
Yet in this financial setting, amid this player calendar, it makes sense. The clubs’ decision is an ordinary one — but so is putting revenue over recovery.
Vincent Kompany, manager of Premier League club Burnley, proposed his solution last September. The former Manchester City and Belgium captain, a veteran of this kind of workload in his playing days, offered a yearly cap on appearances — tentatively suggesting 60 games per player, for club and country combined — to eliminate the extreme cases.
“For the players at the top, who have to play for their national teams and all of these other competitions, it should be capped appearances within a season,” Kompany said. “They (still) have to work hard, don’t get me wrong, but 60 games takes a little bit away.” FIFPro has also researched a similar idea.
Post-season friendlies are prime contenders for the games in line for the chop in that scenario, with such a rule protecting the most at-risk players.
Other stakeholders are less certain about this as a proposal, questioning whether it is too blunt an instrument. Players could miss out on finals, they say, should the regulations not be sufficiently nuanced or if their workload is not managed properly.
FIFA, world football’s governing body, is exploring the prospect of a mandatory three-week, ring-fenced break for players. (Although it is also introducing an expanded, 32-team Club World Cup to be played every four years from June and July 2025 and bumping up the men’s World Cup field from 32 nations to 48 in 2026.)
“It isn’t a situation that is going to be unpicked by working backwards from where we are now,” said the PFA spokesperson. “It requires a collective and coordinated approach to the calendar that starts with an acknowledgement of the physical and mental limits of players. That isn’t happening.
“We can all see the elastic is being stretched, and so we shouldn’t then be surprised when it snaps.”
The race is to see whether PSR’s elastic snaps first.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
Read the full article here