Declan Rice is Arsenal’s running man, a driving force still bidding to make this the club’s greatest season.
The central midfielder could not inspire a first piece of silverware when losing to Manchester City in the League Cup final at the weekend, but he might yet end the campaign with plenty, as a fight continues on three other fronts.
Rice will want this to be a club season that extends all the way through to a Champions League final on May 30, but like so many of the elite, fatigue is the lingering threat ahead of a World Cup summer with England.
Sunday’s final was Rice’s 50th appearance and 44th start of the season for club and country. There is the capacity for another 18 — 15 with Arsenal and three with England — before the World Cup is even underway, with the likelihood Rice will have played more than 70 games by the time England’s summer adventures are over.
The workload is heavy but not unique. Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk brought up his own half-century for the season in the Champions League rout of Galatasaray last week, a feat Newcastle United’s Sandro Tonali had managed by March 7. Others in the Premier League, such as international regulars Martin Zubimendi, Erling Haaland, Bernardo Silva and Malick Thiaw, are all lining up to do the same in the coming weeks.
The League Cup final was Declan Rice’s 50th appearance of the season for club and country (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
The pattern is repeated across Europe’s biggest leagues as the first summer World Cup since 2018 comes into view.
Games, games, games. The demands are greater than ever at the highest level, all of which lead to a tournament that will ask more of the players than any previous World Cup. It promises to be hot and is guaranteed to be long, spanning five and a half weeks with the additional round of knockout fixtures.
It all comes a few months after AFCON, a year after the FIFA Club World Cup, and two from both the last European Championship and Copa America in 2024. It will be the first time in men’s football that there has been such an unrelenting run. The concerns of players’ unions are that a bloated schedule will have its inevitable consequences as players head to the United States, Canada and Mexico in June.
“Historically, we’ve only looked at the calendar from a competition-to-competition perspective,” Maheta Molango, chief executive of the English Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), tells The Athletic. “All of those in isolation can make sense, but when you put one next to the other, you realise it is unfair. Connect the dots and you start to see that it cannot make sense.
“We’re seeing people not just talking about the player perspective — where people say: ‘Listen, these guys make a lot of money’ — but it’s a question now of the quality of the show. It’s really affecting the quality of what we see on the pitch because it is not sustainable.”
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