With the World Cup now over, football’s top international players can finally enjoy some much-needed downtime before the new season starts next month.Yet for the sport’s biggest stars, a chance to unwind properly between one campaign ending and the next one kicking off is becoming increasingly difficult to find.A packed calendar has put greater demands on the players. The expansion of the World Cup from 32 teams to 48 for this edition is one factor, with the potential for this to become 64 at the 2030 tournament likely to exacerbate the issue. The introduction of a new competition at the end of the European season, FIFA’s greatly expanded Club World Cup (though this is once every four years), is another reason why many players’ time off is more squeezed than ever.But what are footballers actually entitled to when it comes to annual leave? What does a typical contract say about this issue? When do they tend to take their holiday, and do disputes over them ever arise?And with the players’ unions calling for a minimum 28-day break before a new season starts, how would that work in an already congested schedule?The Athletic spoke to legal experts to find out.What does a footballer’s contract say about annual leave?“The starting point is players are employees, so they’re technically entitled to the minimum statutory employment annual leave that everyone else is — but they’re obviously in a very unique industry,” Alex Clarke, who leads Onside Law’s employment practice in the UK, tells The Athletic. “So they’ve got a right to five weeks’ holiday — that’s a contractual right.”Clarke says players could, in theory, ask to take their holiday whenever they wanted — for example, they could ask for two weeks off in the middle of the season.However, the reality is their club would always reject that — and have the right to turn such requests down.What happens instead, Clarke says, is that footballers always take all their vacation time in the off-season — the period after a campaign has ended and before they report back for pre-season.Clarke also explains that a player’s contract gives them the right to at least three consecutive weeks of annual leave, something a club cannot unreasonably refuse — although this is subject to first-team commitments and any international-team duties.“What generally happens is the players will take at least three weeks of those five weeks in one go over the summer, or more than that if they don’t have international commitments,” he says. “That’s almost always what happens, because we don’t have a winter break in the UK.“Clubs do generally insist the players do that. So the club basically closes down for the players, other than if they want to go in and use the gym and stuff like that. But they all go off at the same time and keep themselves fit away from the club.”Dan Chapman, partner and head of sport and employment at legal firm Leathes Prior, explains how the holiday year for footballers runs from July 1 through to June 30. “It’s not calculated on a calendar-year basis, like perhaps most employees are used to having,” he says.Chapman says most players report for a final day of training at some point in May, perhaps for end-of-season physical testing, and then return to work for pre-season in late June or early July.“There may be certain days where they might have to go in for fitness tests during that period, or medical treatment, but they will be told, ‘Your contractual holiday is now running from this date through to that date’. And most clubs therefore discharge most, if not all, of the five weeks in one chunk during that period.“I was talking to a player at a Premier League club the other day. They went back for pre-season training on July 4. They had finished the previous season around mid-May, if not early May. And so when you look at that, actually, I think the players got about seven weeks off. That’s how it is normally satisfied, because of the break between the two seasons.”