How The New Club World Cup Puts Player Welfare On The Line
Many of the stars who went to the expanded 32-team FIFA Club World Cup were already among the most overworked footballers this season. That’s the message in fresh data from FIFPRO, the global players’ union, and Football Benchmark - data that lands amid an escalating tug-of-war over the international match calendar, a crowded club schedule, and shrinking recovery windows that are pushing elite players to their limits.
From June 14 to July 13, 2025, the United States staged the first ever month-long, 32-team edition of the Club World Cup - an event FIFA billed as a celebration of club football on a global scale. But even before a ball was kicked, the tournament drew sharp criticism from player representatives who argued that the competition arrived on top of an already unsustainable season. FIFA
Below we unpack the latest workload evidence, the legal and medical context, what the expanded Club World Cup means for players, and what an evidence-based safeguard framework could look like.
The Big Picture: A Calendar That No Longer Fits the Players
FIFPRO’s Player Workload Monitoring (PWM) platform tracks match load, recovery windows, and travel for 1,500 professional men’s players. The 2024/25 season findings—updated through April 1, 2025—paint a stark picture: club-and-country stars heading to the Club World Cup are already at or beyond prudent thresholds by early spring. FIFPRO
Examples from FIFPRO’s April snapshot:
Kerem Aktürkoğlu (Benfica) led the appearances chart with 55 games by April 1.
Luka Modrić (Real Madrid) had 54 appearances.
Julián Álvarez (Atlético Madrid) and Federico Valverde (Real Madrid) were each on 53.
The data also highlights “back-to-back” appearances—any match played with fewer than five days since the previous appearance—because compressed turnarounds elevate injury risk and depress performance. FIFPRO notes that Valverde had already amassed 43 back-to-back appearances by April 1, with projections that he could approach 65 back-to-back matches, ~7,000 minutes, and roughly 78 games by season’s end when club and country are combined. That is a workload pattern far outside the envelope most high-performance experts consider safe.
The PWM framework matters because it quantifies what many players and performance staff feel intuitively: the modern elite calendar stacks two-match weeks for months at a time and then bolts on summer tournaments—often with inadequate off-season and pre-season to reset physiology.
From “Perfect Storm” to Legal Action
In October 2024, FIFPRO Europe, European Leagues, and LaLiga jointly filed a complaint with the European Commission. Their case argues that FIFA, as both a competition organizer and regulator, has imposed calendar decisions—including the expanded Club World Cup—without adequate social dialogue, creating a conflict of interest that violates EU competition law.
A month later, a KU Leuven report commissioned by FIFPRO went further, stating that professional football is failing to apply required health and safety standards and is violating existing legal frameworks at European and global levels. That study has been lodged as evidence in the ongoing legal processes. F
This isn’t just a governance spat; it’s an occupational health debate. The central claim: football’s current calendar does not meet minimum protections expected in other elite sports, and the expanded Club World Cup intensifies the pressure rather than relieving it.
How Much Rest Do Players Actually Get?
Across the 2024 summer tournaments, FIFPRO’s updated analysis shows a striking deficit in off-season and pre-season time for Europe’s top-league participants:
Only 14% of UEFA EURO 2024 players in the sample enjoyed the recommended 28 days off-season rest; for Copa América players based in Europe’s top five leagues, that dropped to 9%.
Post-tournament preparation was equally tight: just 15% had sufficient pre-season after the EURO, and 4% after the Copa América.
And for Club World Cup squads? FIFPRO reported none of the participating elite clubs managed to give their players the full 28-day off-season and 28-day pre-season combination recommended by high-performance experts. Finalists Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain were highlighted as the hardest hit: ~13 days of pre-season for Chelsea, ~7 days for PSG. Front Office Sports
These short turnarounds are not a minor detail. FIFPRO’s Consensus Study on Minimum Player Workload Safeguards—a Delphi process with 70 performance and medical experts—recommends a minimum four-week off-season, followed by a minimum four-week re-training/pre-season before returning to competition. Dr. Darren Burgess, chair of FIFPRO’s High-Performance Advisory Network, calls these “common-sense” thresholds aligned to science and occupational standards. Reuters
Extreme Congestion: Matches, Travel, and Heat
Fixture density intersects with travel and climate to create a compounded risk profile. PWM analysis and related coverage document extreme itineraries—long-haul international windows that leave players with less than 48 hours recovery before re-appearing at club level, a turnaround well below best-practice recommendations. The travel burden is especially heavy for South American internationals returning to Europe and, increasingly, to MLS clubs. FIFPRO
The environment added another layer in 2025. Ahead of kickoff, experts warned the Club World Cup could feature dangerous heat in several U.S. venues, with a large share of matches before late afternoon. FIFPRO urged organizers to lower WBGT thresholds for cooling breaks and reschedule fixtures where necessary—again reflecting that the calendar isn’t just full; it’s also hotter. The Guardian
Meanwhile, FIFA’s commercial push continued: $1 billion in prize money was allocated, with expected tournament revenues around $2 billion—a scale that underlines why the match calendar has become the sport’s most politically charged battleground. Reuters
Who’s Carrying the Heaviest Loads?
FIFPRO’s April 1 snapshot singled out a cluster of Club World Cup-bound players already deep into red-zone territory:
Kerem Aktürkoğlu (Benfica) — 55 appearances by April 1 (most in sample).
Luka Modrić (Real Madrid) — 54.
Julián Álvarez (Atlético Madrid) — 53.
Federico Valverde (Real Madrid) — 53, with 43 of those as back-to-backs (<5-day rest). FIFPRO
FIFPRO’s season-end report later emphasized that multiple stars who then played the Club World Cup blew past the often-cited 55-appearance guideline that many high-performance coaches treat as a practical upper bound for a single season. FIFPRO+1
When those appearances are layered with sub-48-hour post-international windows, multi-time-zone travel, and mid-day summer temperatures, the risk profile doesn’t just rise—it multiplies.
“How Not to Treat a Human”: What the Experts Say
FIFPRO’s messaging around the Club World Cup was unusually blunt. On the eve of the tournament, the union rolled out 12 minimum workload safeguards and warned that, without change, football would remain an “outlier” among elite sports that guarantee long off-seasons and adequate pre-season conditioning. Dr. Darren Burgess summarized the science in simple terms: when players don’t get 28 days off and don’t get 28 days to re-train, injuries and underperformance follow.
Maheta Molango, a FIFPRO board member, distilled the stakes: “Players are either getting injured or not being able to perform at their best because they are pushed to their limit.” The union’s September 2025 call pressed for an urgent overhaul of the calendar to prevent burnout, not just for the next match week, but for the next generation’s careers.
Youth Players Are a Special Risk Group
The safeguards process also highlighted youth exposure. FIFPRO’s experts want specific limits for Under-18 and more research for Under-21, noting that growth plates, tendons, and ligaments remain vulnerable and that psychological strain compounds physical stress when match counts spike early in a career. The union’s reporting across 2024–25 repeatedly pointed to teenagers logging professional volumes that would be high even for seasoned pros—an approach that risks long-term structural damage and burnout.
The “Off-Season” That Wasn’t: Chelsea and PSG as Case Studies
Among the clearest illustrations of the crisis were the Club World Cup finalists:
Chelsea players reportedly had ~3 weeks’ holiday and just ~13 days of pre-season.
PSG players had a similar holiday period but only ~7 days of pre-season.
As FIFPRO notes, those figures fall dramatically short of the 28 + 28 safeguards. That isn’t simply a welfare argument; it’s a performance argument. Modern football’s tempo and physical demands require periodization—structured rest, retraining, and progressive load—in order to avoid a “yo-yo” effect of short breaks followed by immediate high-intensity competition.
What the Data Says About Recovery Windows
So, what is “enough” recovery between matches? The PWM methodology flags <5-day turnarounds as “back-to-back” appearances, a conservative marker used to quantify insufficient recovery. Across the sample, many elite players endure weeks on end of two-match cycles. In a 2023/24 flash report, 88% of high-performance coaches agreed that no player should exceed 55 matches per season—yet more than a third of tracked players in top contexts do just that.
The Club World Cup lands after a dense European run-in—often with international windows sandwiched nearby—so it functions as a second summer tournament layered into the off-season. The result: less genuine rest, less pre-season, and more risk for the season that follows. FIFPRO
Heat, Travel and Load: The 2025 U.S. Edition’s Triple Challenge
Hosting in June/July across 11 U.S. cities magnified environmental and travel variables. Analysts flagged mid-day kickoffs and 30°C+ conditions in several venues despite some evening scheduling—conditions that raise WBGT (wet bulb globe temperature) risk categories and make cooling breaks and rescheduling an urgent safety tool. FIFPRO pressed for such measures ahead of the tournament. The Guardian
Meanwhile, travel fatigue—especially inter-continental turnarounds—remains a chronic under-managed stressor in football compared with U.S. leagues that build longer off-seasons into their CBA frameworks. FIFPRO contrasted football’s weeks-long off-seasons with double-digit-week breaks common in sports like MLB and AFL. The union’s point: football’s continuous competitive cycle is now a global outlier.
If the Money’s There, So Should the Safeguards Be
FIFA projected unprecedented commercial scale for the 2025 tournament, setting $1 billion in prize money and estimating ~$2 billion in revenue. FIFPRO’s counter is not anti-growth; it’s a call for conditional growth—tie the money to clear, enforceable workload rules that protect short- and long-term player health.
Those safeguards (summarized by FIFPRO’s consensus study and subsequent communiqués) include:
28 days minimum off-season (with a two-week “blackout” free of club/National Team contact).
28 days minimum pre-season re-training before first official match.
Protected in-season rest (e.g., one day off per week; a week-long mid-season break with no training/travel).
Back-to-back limits and travel fatigue management, especially post-international windows and long-haul flights.
Age-specific caps and rules for academy players (U18), with further evidence-building for U21.
What Needs to Change—Now
1) Codify the safeguards across all competitions.
Voluntary “best practices” won’t cut it in a calendar this crowded. Safeguards must be regulatory, binding FIFA, confederations, leagues, and clubs. That includes match-count guidance, rest minima, and heat protocols that trigger automatic scheduling changes when thresholds are breached.
2) Re-sequence the calendar to create real off-season blocks.
Stakeholders need to build a clear summer window that is not consumed by back-to-back tournaments. The Club World Cup can exist—but not at the expense of the only time players can actually recover and recondition.
3) Protect international windows and post-window recovery.
Guarantee minimum 72-hour post-travel buffers for inter-continental returns, with squad-size flex or fixture staggering to protect player health without breaking competitive balance.
4) Make youth-specific rules non-negotiable.
Set exposure caps for U18, mandatory off-season/pre-season blocks, and educate clubs, families, and agents on the long-term risks of over-exposing teenagers.
5) Publish transparent workload dashboards.
The PWM platform is a strong start. Push club- and competition-level transparency so broadcasters, sponsors, and fans can see who’s exceeding thresholds and why. Link compliance to commercial incentives.
The Bottom Line
The 2025 Club World Cup proved two things at once: global club football can captivate on a grander stage, and the game’s calendar, as currently built, does not protect the people who make it compelling.
By April 1, leading Club World Cup players were already red-lining on appearances and back-to-back turnarounds. Summer 2024 left many stars with single-digit percentages of adequate off-season and pre-season time. Legal pressure on FIFA has intensified, and medical science keeps pointing to the same solution: mandate rest and retraining with clear, enforceable rules.
Football doesn’t lack data, or money, or desire. It lacks alignment. If organizers want the expanded Club World Cup to thrive—not just commercially, but athletically—they must hard-wire player safeguards into the engine of the calendar. Otherwise, the spectacle will continue to borrow against the health and careers of the very athletes fans pay to see.
