Recently Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp chose to lash out at various football authorities for the hectic scheduling that clubs had been dealing with in recent years.
As per the German, almost every club have been playing way too much football which is causing a negative impact on the players and also hinted that this needed to be sorted out pretty quickly.
‘Ask Sadio how much holiday he has had,’ Klopp had said earlier this week.
‘He’s played pretty much every game for Senegal. He’s played each game for us. Every international break, he is away. Ask him.
‘We sit here and it sounds like I am having a moan or whatever.
‘It is just the situation, in the long-term, is not acceptable. For here (on pre-season) it is not a problem. We have all the boys here, apart from the three up front and Alisson. That’s not the biggest problem for Ali (only having a couple of weeks to prepare) but the other three we will see.
‘They need a holiday. It’s not like after three days you can say to them “Hey! Come on! Let’s start running again!” They have had a tough summer programme.
‘It’s football. It’s not riding a bike, so you lose a little bit (of rhythm). It will all come back but it will be a tough start. For the other teams as well – Tottenham have had it pretty much like we have. But it is just like it is.
‘In the future, we have to change that! It looks like nobody can imagine a week without football in the year. When did that happen? A game again, a game again.’
And when Pep Guardiola was asked to comment on Jurgen Klopp’s statement, the Man City boss chose to back his compatriot saying that this hectic schedule is ‘killing’ the players.
“Some of them will come on the 29th or 30th; the others will come in three or four weeks,” Pep Guardiola said.
“They decide to come back between three or four weeks. I don’t want them to come back when they’re not fit or tired or mentally not recovered from an incredibly tough season.
“We cannot forget we started a new season while Riyad Mahrez had not finished the last one. It’s a crazy schedule and it is going to kill our players! We cannot sustain that for a long time.
“They have to breathe and rest and give more quality in the tournaments. They have to rest.”
