FIFPRO released its World Cup 2022 Post-Tournament Review and Player Survey on Thursday and said the results confirmed its fears around players’ mental and physical fatigue and injury risk.

Varane helped France reach the World Cup Final, and then announced on Feb. 3 he was ending his international career over a “suffocating” schedule.

“[Varane’s] decision should really, really make competition organizers nervous, because it’s ultimately those players who are on the field creating the game, they’re creating the product that is being sold by everybody [...] and they’re the players the fans come to see,” FIFPRO general secretary Jonas Baer-Hoffmann said during a video conference call on Tuesday.

“And if they’re taking career choices of that drastic nature based on their physical and their mental health, caused by the pressure that is on them, that is what we’ve been warning about.”

Varane had just eight days between the World Cup final and his first game back with his club, Manchester United.

Sixty-four World Cup players were surveyed, and a lack of preparation and recovery time and the resulting increased health risks were the key takeaways.

Only 11 percent of players surveyed favored the November-December World Cup timing.

Baer-Hoffman said a repeat of 2022 would be unacceptable.

“If you want to pursue a winter World Cup again, you need [the leagues] to completely change their schedule and provide appropriate training and recovery time, pre- and post-tournament,” he said.

“[It is] unlikely that they will agree to that.”

Eighty-six percent of players want at least 14 days of preparation time, 61 percent would like 14-28 days of post-World Cup recovery time.

The condensed schedule meant the pre-World Cup turnaround for many Europe-based players was just six or seven days. Some players failed to recover from nagging injuries to play in Qatar.

“Which is quite unfortunate [during] the pinnacle of their careers,” said FIFPRO policy advisor Michael Leahy.

Premier League players logged the most World Cup minutes, while Manchester City recorded the most minutes of any team, and Barcelona had the most players at the tournament, with 17.

The impact of stoppage time was also significant. Players ran almost 1.6 extra kilometers during the average 11.6 minutes of added time.

 

Concussion substitutes

Meanwhile, the current concussion protocol in soccer is not working, according to FIFPRO, which supports calls for a trial on temporary concussion substitutes.

The Premier League has also urged the lawmaking International Football Association Board (IFAB) to trial temporary substitutions to allow players with head injuries to be assessed.

IFAB will instead continue with permanent substitutions, which FIFA president Gianni Infantino has declared the “risk-free” approach.

The permanent concussion substitutes rule means that a team can replace a player with a suspected head injury without it counting toward its allocation of substitutes.

“I fail to comprehend the logic, to be very honest,” Baer-Hoffman said during the video conference call.

“The defense of the current model is one that, in our experience over now more than 10 years of working on this, just departs from reality.”

FIFPRO said the pressures around the rule left too much room for error.

“Of course, it would be better to take any player off when you have a suspected concussion and to just take an immediate decision, but it just doesn’t happen in practice,” Baer-Hoffman said.

“We remain convinced the temporary concussion substitutions [...] are actually the safer approach.

“It would mitigate a lot of those pressures, and we will keep pushing ahead to have those.”

The current protocol, which was introduced by the Premier League at the start of 2021, was also criticized by leading head injury charity Headway earlier this week.

“This system has repeatedly failed to protect players, as it relies on either medics making an immediate judgment, or for a player to risk exacerbating their brain injury by playing on for 10 to 15 minutes to see how they get on,” Headway chief executive Luke Griggs said.