Football competitions are expanding, overlapping and bleeding into one another, but is a month off too much to ask?
D
oes it feel too much? Premier League bleeding into the playoffs into the Champions League into the international break … we’re still bleeding … rip off your shirt and make a tourniquet! The European Under-21 and Under‑19 Championships into the Club World Cup, overlapping with the Women’s Euros … oh look the Premier League fixtures for 2025-26 are out and the EFL ones come out next week … and there’s David Prutton paying (excellent) homage to David Mitchell’s pisstake of Sky Sports on Sky Sports: “Catch all of the constantly happening football here it’s all here and it’s all football. Always. It’s impossible to keep track of all the football.”
You start to imagine Billy Joel rewriting We Didn’t Start the Fire … an endless list of footballers and pundits, of owners and streaming services, of controversies and grimness amid the beauty and joy. Will it ever reach breaking point?
To legacy fans (who liked football before the start of June) the Club World Cup may feel like the moment where you switched off, or just didn’t switch on in the first place. If football began yesterday, you’d probably plan it with a tournament with club sides from all over the globe. But football didn’t begin yesterday. Jonathan Wilson can tell you exactly when that was. And of course you don’t have to watch this shoehorned land‑grab of a tournament, but sometimes it would be nice to not even have the option.
