The long-awaited 2022 World Cup is just 10 days away, and the controversy surrounding the tournament in Qatar is reaching a boiling point, many topics regarding different issues such as corruption scandals, discrimination, slave labour, to name a few, keep piling at FIFA headquarters.
One of the most severe concerns involves the players’ fitness, whom are the main cast of the tournament, and even tough this topic was expected to be mentioned sooner or later since the announcement that the World Cup was going to be played in November, the injury bug has finally made a troubling appearance.
Injuries Piling Up
When the World Cup was set to be played on November, everybody knew that the main issues was scheduling conflicts, since all the top leagues are not even at the halfway mark yet, this led to cramping up games in the calendar, so leagues could take a break in November while the international tournament takes places.
Football players are highly competitive, and they have given it everything they’ve got to secure a place in their respective national teams rosters, so taking it easy this past few months was never an option for players whom countries are going to compete in Qatar.
Injuries are starting to pile up since footballers are not machines, and some of the most notable absences include some of the best players in the world, names such as; Sadio Mane, Reece James, Giovani Lo Celso, N’Golo Kante, Paul Pogba, Timo Werner, Jesus Corona, Diogo Jota are all set to miss the World Cup.
League Competitiveness Takes Its Toll
When the calendar was re-arranged in the European Leagues to fit the World Cup, a lot of games had to be postponed, or played on very short turnarounds. So this has, and will have an impact down the line for teams who are top of their leagues. Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Manchester City, Arsenal, PSG, to name a few will have to hope for the best possible outcomes as many of their players will travel to Qatar, and even if they don’t pick up an injury, there is plenty of reason to believe that the 2nd half of all European Leagues are going to be plagued with injuries and burned out players.
A lot of footballers have taken notice on injury concerns recently which has led them to take matters into their own hands, star players such as Lionel Messi, and Karim Benzema took it on themselves to report “physical discomfort” so they could avoid playing this week, and other players such as Robert Lewandoski just took the easy way out and earned himself a red card in order to be exempt from Barcelona’s last game before the break. This make sense for the players point of view, but this just messes up sportsmanship and the beauty of the game. So who is to blame?
FIFA needs to take care of their most valuable asset; the players ,and even tough they are very capable professionals, the game itself needs to be taken care of, so we can have memorable competitions of the game we love.
