How to fix the international breaks?
It’s no secret that international breaks give little to no joy to anyone. Whether they are friendlies or qualifiers, there is just very little enthusiasm for them. Credit to any fan who travels around the world following England. I’m sure there will be a lot of memories or good times but I just have no appetite in traveling to Serbia to watch England play. I’d love to go to a World Cup or a Euros but qualifiers offer me very little intrigue.
I do think part of the problem with international football is that there is too much of it. I do question how seriously senior players take it. How many operate in 2nd gear to reduce the injury risk or how many withdraw from squads because “what’s the point?”. England played Andorra (again) on Saturday evening at a flat Villa Park and while they won 2-0 convincingly the question stands “who cares?”.
As a Sunderland fan international breaks haven’t had a huge impact in the last few years as it rarely stopped league 1 games going ahead and the championship very rarely seemed interrupted because the volume of midweek games was higher. In the Premier League, 3 games have been played and we already have an international break. Once this break is over we will have 4 more games before a 2nd international break takes place on October 11th 2025 before a 3rd break comes after 4 more games on 15th November 2025. All this means that by the time Sunderland have 11 games, there will have been 3 international breaks. We then get a break from the breaks until March 2026 in what is the most bizarre strangely designed calendars I’ve ever come across.
I do think there is a better way for FIFA to manage these pointless interruptions to our club football. I think every country should have a roster of 25-30 players managers can call upon. How you implement the roster can work in several different ways. I think the main benefit of rosters is that it gives players an excuse to earn their place the squad. It also means that players know where they stand with international duty.
Let’s build an example, say the international calendar starts on July 1st 2025. On this day Thomas Tuchel or the FA announce a 25-30 man roster of players they can call up during the season. This roster can only be changed by international retirement, long term injury, long term bans or players not contracted to a club. What this means is that players will want to secure their place in the international teams for the next 12 months so this drives players to perform better and continue to perform to make it into next years roster. For each set of fixtures the manager can pick a squad of 20 players. The rest get released back to their clubs. The roster method allows managers the chance to work with a set squad and develop a better working relationship with players and build a coherent set of tactics and formations.
Throughout the years we’ve seen random call ups because a player has played well for 3 or 4 weeks for them to then disappear and never be seen on the international scene again. I’m thinking David Nugent, Kevin Davis, Ryan Shawcross, James Justin the list goes on. The roster method allows managers to assess players performance over the previous season and plan their squads ahead of time. While some of these players may have “deserved” a call up playing in a friendly against Slovenia isn’t exactly peak football achievement. Maybe I am being incredibly harsh but I’d rather see an England squad win 6-0 because they all know each other then struggle to 1-0 win because they’ve trained together 6 times over 6 months.
Come to the first international break in September 2025 you have 25-30 players who know what their calendar looks like for the next year so their country and their clubs can manage those players to ensure they are given enough rest and recovery to reduce the risk of injury. It also adds value to earning an international cap because it becomes a sort of a closed shop which I normally don’t like but it’s open for those who can earn a spot it’s not ideal but it’s better then what is done on other sports.
The England Cricket Board (ECB) gives players central contracts for which is a guaranteed salary and job security in exchange for prioritising their training and playing for the national team. This has had a negative effect because some players can go years without playing for their county who are also paying them a salary for a few days training per year. I disagree with this principle entirely because it’s much more restrictive than it is helpful to anyone. It only benefits the ECB as it essentially “protects their assets” for want of better words.
The negatives of the roster method is that if a player is picked and is just not good enough then it doesn’t help anyone. For 12 months they’ll never make squads and just be a spare part but that’s the risk, you have fit them into the squad. You can gamble on young players developing or they can continue to develop with the u21s which sometimes needs to happen. Some players are elevated too quickly to first team international football and too many are over played and over exposed for too long which negatively impacts their development. The other negative is that if you have a player develop during a season, you can’t pick them, you have your roster. Unless someone retires or picks up a long term injury. If that does happen and you lose a centre back and you have next incarnate of Brazilian Ronaldo coming through, do you take that risk? Or you could implement a like for like rule. So if you lose a centre back you have to replace them with a centre back.
Ultimately I think a roster method requires more ability from a manager to work with what they have and gives them a greater challenge to develop players and I think for the fans, it lets them get behind a team because it’s more recognisable and identifiable with a club side. As an acid test for this, an interview was done with Eric Dier recently where he was asked how he felt not been picked for England. Ask yourself, do you care? Does the international fate of Eric Dier really matter to you? Of course it doesn’t and that’s the problem with it. Who cares?
Smaller nations like Northern Ireland, wales, Luxembourg and Malta have less resources to call upon so restricting nations like England, France or Spain to rosters will not level the playing field but make it harder for bigger nations to just move in more world class talent. Instead of thinking about the problem FIFA and UEFA have, they seem only capable of binary thinking. Is it going to make us money? If the answer is yes, they will do it, if the answer is no, they won’t.
Look the international break isn’t going to change, it will continue to be boring. However, at some point, something will have to give but what do fans of the game know…
