da premier bet： “In Spain, they call it ‘Fifa virus’”, said Michael Laudrup last week when pointing out Swansea could have a good chance against Tottenham after the international break. We do call it ‘Fifa virus’, indeed. The Spanish media started using the term to refer to how top teams struggle in the league after most of their stars have been called up by their national team. But are international breaks a real harm for big Premier League clubs, or just an excuse to justify a bad result?
da cassino： It cannot be denied club managers are partially right when they moan about seeing the majority of their players disappearing for ten days in the middle of the season. They often travel thousands of miles to play for their countries, sometimes pointless games, and come back exhausted – if not injured – without time to prepare the next league fixture.
In Spain, where the spine of the national squad is provided by the Madrid-Barca duo, the attention that the media pays to what Vicente del Bosque asks of his players borders on the absurd, to the point of keeping track of how many minutes the footballers of each one of the two giants have played. If the Spanish coach has used more Barcelona players and rested Real’s ones, the Catalans will raise their voices claiming an outrageous favouritism, and vice versa.
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On the other hand, it seems fair to point out what the clubs sometimes overlook in their assertions. The fact is that not always the player has to travel to the other side of the world, overcome the jet lag, fight the hardest of battles and come back from a hectic experience. Sometimes being called up by your national team just means a home game against San Marino, Liechtenstein, or any other weak opponent, bag a 6-0 and job done without more effort than a training session. Definitely not harder than a trip to Russia in the middle of the week for a Champions League fixture, for example. But yet the managers tend to blame the bad results on this so-called ‘Fifa virus’.
The question is, how badly have the international breaks affected the Premier League ‘big boys’ this season? Well, taking into consideration the top five Premier League clubs at the moment (Manchester United, Manchester City, Tottenham, Chelsea and Arsenal) we can come up with some conclusions.
Since the 2012-13 season started back in August, there have been six international breaks followed by league games. In those Premier League fixtures Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City managed to get 13 out of the 18 points up for grabs. United follow the trio with 12 points, while Tottenham seems to be the most affected, having bagged only half of the points (9). It feels necessary to mention that Spurs had, on paper, the hardest calendar, as two of those six games were direct clashes against Arsenal and Chelsea (having been defeated in both).
Those numbers give a slight idea of how each club have dealt with the international breaks, but a measurement of their performance over the rest of the season is needed in order to get an overarching view of the matter.
Therefore, analysing the rest of the games shows that Manchester United is the most affected team by the breaks, as their performance drops down from an average of 2.7 points in regular games to 2.0 in games after international football is played. Spurs follow the Red Devils with 1.92 points per game against 1.75, while Manchester City seem to perform equally (2.0 versus 2.1). Surprisingly – or maybe not by now – Arsenal (1.7 against 2.1) and Chelsea (1.8 and 2.1) have obtained better results after their stars have been with the national teams.
There could be more factors to consider of course – calendar, miles travelled, number of players used, minutes played -, but the above results show there is not a trend that explains a losing tendency at the top teams. In fact, some teams with plenty of international players (Manchester City, Chelsea) perform as good or better, suggesting that international football does not have a negative impact on their results.
It may be distracting from clubs’ bread and butter or tedious for the fans (no one likes to see the race for a title stopped by a friendly game), and the debate could evolve into how to make international football more attractive – a month in the football calendar only for national teams, perhaps? – but in the meantime we could say that what we call in Spain ‘Fifa virus’ is nothing other than a serious bout of ‘man flu’.
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