– I think we will see a World Cup with players who are ready on paper, but who are actually not, says Viking player and news’s World Cup expert Kristoffer Løkberg. The most controversial football World Cup of all time is approaching. Ever since the awarding of the championship twelve years ago, there has been criticism of Qatar. According to Amnesty International, there is a systematic violation of human rights in the country, among other things against the migrant workers who have helped build the World Cup arenas. The opening match will be played on Sunday 20 November, and then an intense month of important matches in high heat follows. The list of stars who have sustained injuries in recent weeks has only grown. The sports website The Athletic writes that the 13 nations that on paper have the best chance of lifting the trophy in Qatar have had 42 injuries to WC-relevant players between them in the build-up to the championship. A whopping 88.1 per cent of these injuries concern wear and tear injuries, i.e. muscle or tendon injuries. – Previous studies have shown that the risk of injury increases noticeably if you have a slightly longer period of three matches a week, says Truls Raastad, professor of sports physiology at the Norwegian University of Sports, to news. He believes that if one does not manage to roll enough in the player group during such periods, it seems that those who play the most will not be able to recover sufficiently, and will thus accumulate some wear and tear in muscle and tendon tissue over time. – It will eventually result in an acute injury, says Raastad further. Raastad has a doctorate in sports physiology and specializes in research and teaching related to muscular adaptations to training. He highlights the approach to the national team in the days before the World Cup as completely decisive for the health, capacity and performance of the players during the World Cup. PROFESSOR: Truls Raastad at the Norwegian Sports Academy. Photo: NIH – How the players will be affected will depend on what the individual national teams decide to do in terms of training load in the short period. If they try to get in a lot of training with a heavy load, in addition to the travel load the players get, this can turn out completely wrong. Here, it is important for the trainers to have ice in their stomachs and not stress about getting in too much activity before the first match. – Steinhardt Karim Benzema (France), Sadio Mané (Senegal), Timo Werner (Germany), Ben Chilwell (England) and Reece James (England) are among the players who will lose the World Cup. So do Ngolo Kanté (France), Diogo Jota (Portugal) and Christopher Nkunku (France). Others, such as Raphaël Varane (France), Son Heung-min (South Korea), Kalvin Phillips (England) and Angel Di Maria (Argentina) are fighting to be fit for the World Cup. All of these have been taken out, but whether they are ready for competition is not good to know. – If you take someone back from injury and use them too quickly, you increase the risk of a new injury, says news’s WC expert Åge Hareide. The veteran coach led Denmark out of group C in the World Cup four years ago. The Danish dream came to an end in the round of 16, when losing finalist Croatia knocked them out after a penalty shootout. It was the best WC for the Danes in twelve years, after they also made it to the round of 16 in South Korea/Japan in 2002. But it was a completely different charge for Hareide and his Danish boys than the current Denmark coach Kasper Hjulmand and the other national teams get. – We had a whole month together with Denmark before the World Cup in 2018. We played matches, trained sensibly and got people screwed right into place. Now they have to go straight down and just start playing, says Hareide, who remembers that Christian Eriksen came to the WC build-up to the Danes tired after a demanding season. – But he said himself that he found inspiration and joy by being there, recalls Hareide. WC EXPERIENCE: Åge Hareide during the round of 16 against Croatia. It even ended with a loss after a penalty shootout. Photo: Svein Ove Ekornesvåg / NTB But the calendar now is fiercer than four to five years ago. The 2022/23 season is packed. Club football took a World Cup break on Sunday 13 November, and the World Cup-ready players are already in place in Qatar, where they have had just under a week with the national team before the opening match between Qatar and Ecuador on 20 November. The grueling programme, in which especially the big teams that play in the Meisterliga, Europa League or Serie Liga as well as in secret tournaments, comes after a summer with a shorter summer holiday than normal, as there were international matches in the National League after the 2021/22 season was finished . – Uefa and Fifa are very strict, says Hareide about the schedule. – The timing of this championship is extremely reprehensible. It just had to be packed into the calendar to get it done, says Kristoffer Løkberg. In a new report, Fifpro, the international players’ union, says that players are being pushed beyond “acceptable limits”, and that the term list is not sustainable. “The workload is harmful” for the players’ physical and mental health, reads the verdict from Fifpro, according to the BBC. Fighting for the players Several players and coaches have recently had this championship in the back of their minds. Leicester City coach Brendan Rodgers called the time in the World Cup “not ideal”. – The players will give everything for their club, but there is no doubt that in the back of their minds they are thinking that an injury could prevent them from playing in the WC. Chelsea captain César Azpilicueta himself acknowledged from a player’s perspective that players are worried about sustaining an injury and losing the World Cup. The Spaniard called the term list “madness”. – And that is why we are fighting for the welfare of the players, he told Reuters in October. CRITICAL: Chelsea captain César Azpilicueta is one of those who have criticized the fierce match schedule. Photo: HANNAH MCKAY / Reuters In the past, both Gareth Bale, Kevin De Bruyne and Toni Kroos have been critical of the ever-increasing number of matches during a season. The latter said, according to the news agency Ap, in an episode of the podcast “Einfach mal Luppen” that the opinion of the players does not matter since they are never asked, and that Uefa and Fifa want to “extract as much as possible financially, while taking everything out of the players purely physically”. – It is too much and we must have change. There are far too many matches and the players’ bodies cannot cope with such schedules year after year, Gareth Bale said according to the Manchester Evening News before a national league match against Belgium earlier this year. Kristoffer Løkberg thinks the whole thing is just sad. – The pursuit of becoming a world champion in football must be one of the greatest things one can experience. To be taken out and not be 100 percent ready either physically or mentally must be extremely difficult. And we are talking about short careers, he says, and continues: – Imagine if that one championship is ruined for you. You can be drafted, but it is ruined by injury or not being ready because you are tired. And when the next championship comes you can suddenly be too bad or too old. Can affect the quality An example that underlines the crazy drive and pressure the players are under is Sadio Mané. Liverpool fought for the league gold until the last day of the season in the 2021/22 season, and also made it to the final of the League Cup, the FA Cup and the Champions League. In other words, they played every single game. Sadio Mané was on the field in 51 games for the club team, and was also involved in leading Senegal to victory in the African Championship. The calculation is easy – and illustrates the hard work: 51 games for Liverpool in all competitions. 18 for the Senegalese national team and 24 for Bayern Munich since the transfer last summer. Mané has been on the pitch for 93 games since the start of last season. Last Tuesday, he left Bayern Munich’s match against Werder Bremen with an injury. And now it is clear that Mané will not make it to the World Cup, which weakens Senegal’s chances in Qatar. IN TROUBLE: Sadio Mané’s injury casts a dark shadow over Bayern Munich’s 6-1 win against Werder Bremen. Now Senegal will probably lose the World Cup. Photo: ANDREAS GEBERT / Reuters Not everyone in the World Cup will have played as many games as Sadio Mané, but there are many examples of players who are key pieces for club and national teams, who will now embark on a win-or-lose championship. And then the question is: How will the hard driving affect them in Qatar? – In a worst-case scenario, where players have to go through even matches in an even group and may have to play extra innings in the play-offs, we will definitely see players who do not recover sufficiently between matches, and then the tempo and quality of the game will decrease. It is likely that some of these will also suffer muscle injuries, says Truls Raastad. – To what extent we will see this depends on how good the individual teams are at distributing the load on several players throughout the championship. But the wear and tear on individual players can be enormous, he adds.
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