Players 'close' to going on strikes - Rodri

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/live/cx2llgw4v7nt

The best line from Rodri was on whether players will go on strike over the expanded football calendar. The Manchester City and Spain midfielder said: "I think we're close to that. It's the general opinion of the players, and if it keeps this way, we'll have no other option. I really think it's something that worries us. We are the guys who suffer."
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Manchester City midfielder Rodri was asked what is the optimum number of games a player should be expected to play in a season: "From my experience I can tell you that 60 or 70 - no. Between 40 and 50 is the amount of games in which a player can perform at the highest level. After that you drop because it is impossible to sustain the physical level.

"This year we are maybe going to go until 70 or maybe 80. In my humble opinion, I think it is too much.

"Someone has to take care of us because we are the main characters of this, let's say, sport, or business, whatever you want to call it.

"Not everything is about money or marketing. It is about the quality of show. In my opinion, when I am not tired I perform better. If people want to see better football then we need to rest."
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What do we think of this then?

Personally I agree.

I understand the counterpoint which is that managers should utilise a squad with the resources available to them instead of overworking a starting 11 but the counter to that is that they obviously want to win and you do so with your best players on the pitch.
 
Is there something obvious from stopping players building this into their contracts? Seems a fairly simple solution, part of your negotiation with a club / prospective new one.
 
I get sick to death if these things. They have squad of 25, the majority probably worth at least 40/50 mil. They're being paid an absolute fortune. It's the manager's decision whether to play them in every game or not. How about seeing it more as an opportunity to blood youth?

I don't like this new format because it's turning into a super league and fans are getting more detached from the game. But these players who are on 100s of thousands pound a week complaining about playing too much football grinds my gears. Tell your manager you don't want to play if you want.
 
If the players are hit in their pockets, there won't be any strike. These players sign these luxurious contracts and don't expect to pay with more efforts ?
 
I think it's odd there hasn't been more movement towards players striking over this issue before now.
 
elmo said:
They can start by doing away with international friendlies. Those are fecking pointless apart from FIFA and the FAs earning money.
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Frankly I would do away with international football period but that will never happen. I do think you might see more players choosing to follow the Ben White approach in future, club football is where they make their money and if they are pushed into a spot where they feel something has to give it is probably going to be international games.
 
These players get paid ridiculous wages and there moaning about doing there job. A lot of normal jobs are a lot longer hours per week than what they do and get paid a lot less. How about they get a reduced calendar but reduced wages also. Let’s see how many of them vote for that one.
 
kouroux said:
If the players are hit in their pockets, there won't be any strike. These players sign these luxurious contracts and don't expect to pay with more efforts ?
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I agree with players and also think that top clubs don't actually have an excuse since they are currently stockpiling talents and don't actually use their entire squads. But yeah, if I was a club executive I would reduce my wage offers by a third if you impose a game limit that sees you potentially play 1/3 less.
 
I'm just imagining the CAF, Kobbie and Licha are rested for the next PL game and we lose

We as fans are partly responsible,, we expect the best players to play and kick up up a fuss if they don't and our team loses
 
Maybe be more shite at football and you won't be playing so many games.

It's really only 5-6 seasons out of your entire life where this may become an issue as you peak in elite sports. Are you worried about long term health after you retire or is it something else?

Meanwhile nurses, firemen, doctors, teachers, and people critical to the overall infrastructure of their country put in 50-60 hours a week for a lifetime and get paid a lot less where companies try to suppress their wages.

Footballers can do one of this is an issue. Oh and don't piss and moan when you get substituted in the 60th minute because you're Manager is resting you.
 
Are there that many more games these days than historically? My perception is the problem for players is more a result of modern-day pressing focused tactics. The likes of City / Liverpool expected to press relentlessly for 90 minutes every match inevitably results in fatigue / stress, i always thought this about Klopp when he moaned about it, if your players can't keep up with the schedule then rotate / dial-down the intensity.
 
Ah diddums, 2 games a week (rarely 3) too much for the millions they earn? I have little sympathy. If you're tired tell the manager and they'll rest you. Something most workers are unable to do without taking sick/unpaid pay. At the end of the day it's an entertainment and not an essential to keep communities moving. On strike you go.
 
JPRouve said:
I agree with players and also think that top clubs don't actually have an excuse since they are currently stockpiling talents and don't actually use their entire squads. But yeah, if I was a club executive I would reduce my wage offers by a third if you impose a game limit that sees you potentially play 1/3 less.
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That sounds fair, though shame it'll never happen.

There is a wider point about saturation levels of football and expanding tournaments making them a more boring viewing experience, with more dead rubber and one-sided games.

Even if you don't care about player welfare, low energy matches were players are clearly knackered and teams struggling with injuries also make dull viewing.
 
LawCharltonBest said:
But he won’t be needed for most of them
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If they're paying him they might as well.

Although I have no doubt that many players will have relegation clauses in their contracts.

I've been wondering whether City have not put relegation clauses in their contracts these last few years anticipating the possibility of relegation
 
DJ_21 said:
These players get paid ridiculous wages and there moaning about doing there job. A lot of normal jobs are a lot longer hours per week than what they do and get paid a lot less. How about they get a reduced calendar but reduced wages also. Let’s see how many of them vote for that one.
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Seems like a pleb/prole problem, poor old Rodri is just out there trying to live his bestest life. What does some labourer with a shovel and ten hour days know of Rodri’s struggle.
 
In 08/09 when United played in the Club World Cup, they played 66 games. I can't remember off the top of my head but presumably the likes of Rooney and Ronaldo played 10-15 internationals in the same season, as well as coming off the back of the Euros (obviously not in Rooney's case).

The 'expanded' calendar has been discussed to death in recent years, but I can't see how it's any different to what it was 15-20 years ago. It's only this season that they've shoehorned in a couple of extra Champions League games.

With the size, depth and cost of squads, plus the advances in sports science and recovery techniques, I don't see any reason why the top clubs can't play 60 games a season.
 
Meanwhile every contract which they sign is much bigger than last one. Hm, why is that? I know.....because you play more games, you stupid, ignorant, spoiled feckers. It is the same case when women (in football, to be clear) are crying about equal wage while ignoring all the facts from where money comes in football.

There are 4 obvious solutions for this '"problem".
1. Go and play for middle or bottom table clubs. Then you will play one game per week. But you will be paid 3 or 4 times less. So, it is a big no, i guess?
2. Tell your fecking manager (who wanted to have 25 expensive players) to rotate more. Oh wait, then you will make a fuss in media why you didn't play, right?
3. Refuse bigger salary in next contract but demand that you will play only certain amount of games.
4. You don't need to play for NT and you will have break every month.

And people shit on me on this forum because i don't have sympathy for football players. Spoiled, stupid, ignorant and selfish prima donnas.

Like in every job, if you are good at it you can choose your path.
You can work for some small company, 8 hours per day for average money or you can go to work for big company 12 hours per day for big money.
Who is forcing Rodri or Kdb to play for City? Is that something which they MUST do? No. They can sign for Tenerife and enjoy in life.
 
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Jippy said:
That sounds fair, though shame it'll never happen.

There is a wider point about saturation levels of football and expanding tournaments making them a more boring viewing experience, with more dead rubber and one-sided games.

Even if you don't care about player welfare, low energy matches were players are clearly knackered and teams struggling with injuries also make dull viewing.
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It’s really odd when people come into these threads and pile on the players. Of course they can be worked like cart horses, but as a consequence you’ll have plenty of injuries, reduced performance levels and a shorter shelf life. Awful for the spectacle, as you say.
 
The point Rodri is making is clearly correct. If players are overplayed, the quality of the football they produce is reduced. Which is bad for fans.

And if your solution is for the best players to be rotated more, that's hardly ideal for fans either. Because typically we want to see the best players playing the best possible level of football, especially if we're paying increasingly high ticket prices to go see those games.

And yet the immediate knee-jerk response of so many people is to criticise the players and make braindead comparisons to nurses, teachers, etc. In effect siding with the football bodies who are looking to extract as much money as possible from fans through a diluted product with higher prices, rather than the actual talent we pay to watch.
 
If you're that bothered don't fly to Australia a day after the season ends to play a couple of friendlies for a starter.
 
I think as a consumer the proof is in the pudding. More games hasn’t made it any better for us to view, it’s only made it worse. Not really sure why anyone would slag off players moaning, yeah getting paid loads blah blah blah, but it doesn’t make it any more entertaining for us, they’re not robots.
 
How many more games are they legitimately playing than say 20 years ago?

International breaks certainly seem more frequent I’ll give him that, but at club level…they’ve made the League Cup easier for big clubs and the FA are doing away with FA cup replays?
 
It's something that players, managers and clubs need to deal with internally. The ones that struggle with fixtures have huge squads typically. Why aren't the big clubs just fully rotating for the league cup, which for ages I've been saying teams in Europe for that season shouldn't even be involved in anyway? This new club world cup, just feck it off like a summer pre season tournament and forget about it. Nobody is forcing the managers to play their players who are overloaded with minutes in the lesser competitions.

Obviously there's money involved, but is the league cup actually lucrative? This club world cup, is this actually lucrative enough for teams to risk the well being of their players? Managers and clubs need to align with their players and adjust expectations accordingly. Decide in advance if you're leaving these smaller cups for the bench players, and go from there...

From a players POV, you could just add in limitations on fixtures or competitions, maybe as a percentage of fixtures they can play in each cup so they can be eligible for 100% of the league and CL but only 30% of the league cup games or whatever.
 
Andycoleno9 said:
Meanwhile every contract which they sign is much bigger than last one. Hm, why is that? I know.....because you play more games, you stupid, ignorant, spoiled feckers. It is the same case when women (in football, to be clear) are crying about equal wage while ignoring all the facts from where money comes in football.

There are 4 obvious solutions for this '"problem".
1. Go and play for middle or bottom table clubs. Then you will play one game per week. But you will be paid 3 or 4 times less. So, it is a big no, i guess?
2. Tell your fecking manager (who wanted to have 25 expensive players) to rotate more. Oh wait, then you will make a fuss in media why you didn't play, right?
3. Refuse bigger salary in next contract but demand that you will play only certain amount of games.
4. You don't need to play for NT and you will have break every month.

And people shit on me on this forum because i don't have sympathy for football players. Spoiled, stupid, ignorant and selfish prima donnas.

Like in every job, if you are good at it you can choose your path.
You can work for some small company, 8 hours per day for average money or you can go to work for big company 12 hours per day for big money.
Who is forcing Rodri or Kdb to play for City? Is that something which they MUST do? No. They can sign for Tenerife and enjoy in life.
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I cannot agree more with this. The way footballers are treated, they should not be complaining about the amount of games they have.

The points you have made are valid, well if you dont want to play so many games, play for a club that isn't challenging for the title. I have 0 sympathy when it comes to footballers and number of games.

They are getting paid millions to entertain, to play 2 games a week, where most players are rotated anyway and those who aren't, get paid more than the ones who aren't.

On a general, they wake up late, get lunch, access to state of the art facilities in gym, sports facility, swimming, recovery, health, travel etc.. I mean some clubs go as far as hiring them private planes to get to their NT and back.

sullydnl said:
The point Rodri is making is clearly correct. If players are overplayed, the quality of the football they produce is reduced. Which is bad for fans.
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Here is a point where its a myth that people believe in. City have won the league in the last 4 and 6/7 titles, had a treble, won multiple domestic trophies, got to semis and finals of CL regularly. That is 7 years of consistent good football they have been playing, so where is the quality reduced?

Ronaldo, Messi, Benzema, Modric, Kroos, Lewandowski all examples of players who played alot of football from a young age, yet at the age of 29-33 were still regarded as great footballers, playing at their best. 10 years on.
 
Judas said:
I think as a consumer the proof is in the pudding. More games hasn’t made it any better for us to view, it’s only made it worse. Not really sure why anyone would slag off players moaning, yeah getting paid loads blah blah blah, but it doesn’t make it any more entertaining for us, they’re not robots.
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They don't need to be robots. Every big club (and players who cry are only ones from big clubs) have 2 internations for every position. Plus shit load of top prospects in youth teams.
Those who play a lot should go and have a chat with their manager (who insisted on having huge squad) instead this moaning.
 
20-30 years ago:

- Fa Cup replays from round 3 to the semi final
- Double group staged Champions League (17 games to win it, albeit this didn't last long)
- 42 game league seasons
- 2 legged League Cup ties

Meanwhile the money they earn gets sillier and sillier. I understand we want the game to get faster as it continues to do so, but is it really going in a terrible direction? Seems to me like there's less games now than there was 2-3 decades ago. The mad exceptions are the nonsense Club World Cup changes which I hope clubs will just send reserve squads to. Striking is a ridiculous notion.
 
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NotoriousISSY said:
How many more games are they legitimately playing than say 20 years ago?

International breaks certainly seem more frequent I’ll give him that, but at club level…they’ve made the League Cup easier for big clubs and the FA are doing away with FA cup replays?
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Number of games probably just a few more. But competitive and/or games that "matter" I think is where it's ramped and if left up to just the federations it will ramp further.

Main culprits of that are Nations League (vs previously more friendlies), expanded Champions League group stage, expanded World Cup, expanded Euros, and now the proposed expanded FIFA World Club Cup.

For me one issue is that I do think the quality drops off a bit, especially towards the tail end of seasons/into the summer tournaments. It's a sort of tragedy of the commons. Each federation wants a few more competitive games (or in FIFA and UEFA's case a whole new tournament) to drive extra TV revenue, but there's no one centrally limiting the outcome in terms of total games. I don't even love it as a fan as I prefer quality over quantity.
 
Everyone complains that players are getting injured too often, that they play too much and look tired, and then the second a player says they play too much all the fans jump on them and start saying, oh suck it up you make a fortune, rotate the squad, etc... or, it's wrong to make these players play every 3 days for 10 months (11 every other year) just to make Uefa and Fifa a little extra money.

If nothing else, it's affecting the quality of football, your average top player is playing non stop and they are tired, they aren't doing what they are fully capable of doing, because they're completely knackered. Bruno, for example, would probably be far more effective for us if he player about 10 games less a season, because most of last season he just looked absolutely shot.
 
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romufc said:
I cannot agree more with this. The way footballers are treated, they should not be complaining about the amount of games they have.

The points you have made are valid, well if you dont want to play so many games, play for a club that isn't challenging for the title. I have 0 sympathy when it comes to footballers and number of games.

They are getting paid millions to entertain, to play 2 games a week, where most players are rotated anyway and those who aren't, get paid more than the ones who aren't.

On a general, they wake up late, get lunch, access to state of the art facilities in gym, sports facility, swimming, recovery, health, travel etc.. I mean some clubs go as far as hiring them private planes to get to their NT and back.



Here is a point where its a myth that people believe in. City have won the league in the last 4 and 6/7 titles, had a treble, won multiple domestic trophies, got to semis and finals of CL regularly. That is 7 years of consistent good football they have been playing, so where is the quality reduced?

Ronaldo, Messi, Benzema, Modric, Kroos, Lewandowski all examples of players who played alot of football from a young age, yet at the age of 29-33 were still regarded as great footballers, playing at their best. 10 years on.
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The argument isn't that overplaying players makes Man City worse. It's that it impacts the general standard of top level football games relative to how it would look if the best players weren't run into the ground.

The part I've highlighted in bold tells you absolutely nothing about the general quality of the football served up in those games. Or, more to the point, the quality of football served up by those players across all the club and international games fans are expected to pay premium prices to go see.

You as a consumer are effectively arguing to be sold a worse product. Whether it's through the best players playing worse when you watch football, or the best players playing less frequently when you watch football. And your compensation is being able to pay ever increasing prices to see that diluted product more frequently.
 
NotoriousISSY said:
How many more games are they legitimately playing than say 20 years ago?

International breaks certainly seem more frequent I’ll give him that, but at club level…they’ve made the League Cup easier for big clubs and the FA are doing away with FA cup replays?
Click to expand...
There was a lot of bloat in the calendar 20-25 years ago as well. In the space of 12 months in 1999/00 Roberto Carlos took part in 74 games for club and country. Could've been 79 had he also taken part in that year's Confederations Cup as well as the Copa America.
 
I would love to see this;
FA and UEFA decide to cut 10-15 games per season. And then, club sends them (players) a new contract with 30% less money.
It would be; "eh, uuh, what, ehm, er....what is this?".
 
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