So why NBA players can do Back to Backs? 👀
(i am not even american)
Because they’re different sports. During the Stanley Cup playoffs, you play every other day, even if the last game had 3-4-5 overtimes. MLB regularly does doubleheaders and any regular season game could go on until there’s a winner. Mention a 20 game regular season to NFL players (or try to increase to workload of pitchers) and you’re a dead man.
Go look up how much the average distance an NBA player runs in a single game. Then look up how much the average distance an football player runs in a single game.
Soccer players run up to 3x the distance, do full sprints way more often, and have the added difficulty of dribbling/turning.
“I love playing 12.30” Jürgen Klopp
it will reach to a certain point where clubs will purposely throw in the small cup and it turns into which team wanted to lose more.
I know r/soccer hates Newcastle but what’s happening to them at the moment is a poster for what’s wrong here (so are Brighton, and others, and indeed most clubs have big injury lists).
Club gets to the champions league spot for the 1st time in ages, spends basically the max allowed by FFP to try to increase the squad to cope but it’s nowhere near enough. Yesterday 10+ out after getting several back post international break. Their 25 man squad left the line up as including a 17 year old in the first 11, 3 goalkeepers on the bench, 4 kids with basically 0 prem mins and 2 semi-retired lads whose ages probably sum to 112.
If we’re not to change to less games, do away with injury time (by punishing harshly any time wasting perhaps?). Or could some forced rotation work - eg in baseball they often play 5 days in a row but have different pitchers each day. Could limit the number of starters who are allowed to play a mid-week game after playing 70+mins at the weekend.
Prem should make squad caps larger at the least if the schedule must be like this
Increasing squad size is the way. The governing bodies love money too much to play less games so having more players could go some way to alleviating the stress on players’ bodies.
