FIFPRO’s report on the 2024–25 football season highlights concerns over the number of footballers in the men’s game. The key findings cover several areas of concern, perhaps most notably persistent calendar congestion and extreme heat.
The 32-team Club World Cup placed immense pressure on players, resulting in some players like Achraf Hakimi having their seasons stretched for almost an entire year.
The report adds that Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Manchester City and Bayern Munich have all significantly shortened their off-season and preseason for the current campaign due to competition. Without better protection and better load management, there are concerns that many players’ participation in the 2026 World Cup is at risk.
The FIFPRO report found that the consensus of medical experts is that competition rules should include a minimum of four weeks between seasons and a minimum of two days between appearances to allow adequate recovery, and that the increased travel burden should be considered when scheduling fixtures.
“You’ve got a pretty good idea of how not to treat a human being,” Dr. Darren Burgess, an adviser to FIFPRO, told reporters in a media call to present the report.
“You have players who play a large number of games, then have less than the recommended off-season days and then play a large number of games in the pre-season days,” he said. “The cycle keeps repeating.”
“This leads to injury at worst and reduced ability to perform at best,” he said.
heat up anxiety
One of the other major concerns in the report was heat, which was highlighted for the first time five years after FIFPRO began distributing these annual reports.
“This year, given the impact on the Club World Cup and the road to the World Cup in the Americas, it felt important to include it in the report,” said Alexander Bielefeld, FIFPRO’s director of policy and strategic relations.
“The risk to players’ health is clearly increasing,” he said.
Using the Club World Cup as a case study, the report found that temperatures at four games in the United States reached above 28 degrees Celsius. wetbulb globe temperature (82 °F WBGT), which under FIFPRO guidelines meant they should have been postponed. A further 17 games had temperatures near the cancellation threshold.
“This is an issue that affects many different markets in the context of a warming planet,” according to the report. “The Club World Cup was a warning in this regard and a bad example of how to deal properly with situations.”
On one occasion, Borussia Dortmund made their substitute players sit inside because the temperature outside was too high.
“The harder and longer athletes play, the greater their exposure to heat, which increases the risk of everything from fatigue and dizziness to heat stroke and long-term illnesses,” Manal Azzi, an occupational health and safety expert at the International Labor Organization, told FIFPRO.
Six of the 16 World Cup host cities face conditions classified as “extreme risk” for heat-related illness, raising concerns for players and fans, FIFPRO reports. With 48 teams from three countries with three different climates, increased fatigue is a serious risk.
The matter has been further complicated by US President Donald Trump, who recently said he would move matches from host cities he deemed too dangerous, accusing San Francisco and Seattle of being “run by radical left-wing lunatics.”
what happens next?
With FIFPro currently engaged in legal action against FIFA over the congested nature of the calendar and the playing group’s voices becoming even louder, the hope is that concrete change is coming. The players’ union believes that years of accumulated data outweigh their arguments, and there is a real sense in the game that no one disputes that load management is an issue.
“There has been a significant shift in discourse,” Bielefeld said. “This is not enough. We need urgent action, but we are in a very different situation than we were two-three years ago.”
Alexander Phillips, Secretary General of FIFPRO, said, “We will continue to fight for the best possible outcome on this issue and many others.”
“But they all come down to the same issue,” he said, “which is that the system is not working.”
Meanwhile, the soccer program begins and the World Cup looms. With 48 teams and 104 games, it will be the biggest edition of the competition ever. Fans can only hope that next summer, the world’s best players will be fit and healthy enough to participate.
Edited by: Chuck Penfold