Money Makes Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola’s Strike Idea Impossible

Manchester City coach Pep Guardiola had an intriguing suggestion when asked how players and coaches might tackle soccer’s bruising schedule: a strike.

“There is only one solution to change something, maybe if all the players decide for themselves to say; ‘stop’,” said Guardiola “Then FIFA, UEFA
EFA
will maybe react a little bit.”

Inspiration, the Catalan coach suggested, could be drawn from the actions of Spain’s international women’s team who’d successfully used a boycott to help force the removal of leaders at the governing body.

“Look at Spain with the women’s team, the players decided to change something and they changed it,” he continued, “they changed something because the players decided that they had something inside to protect the players, and the future of the teams for new generations. The biggest legacy is that. The women’s teams in Spain did it, I don’t know if, in men’s world football, they will do it.”

Guardiola’s point was that players, ultimately, are the ones holding the power, soccer’s product doesn’t exist without them.

“In this business, the show must go on. Without Pep, keep going, but without the players, the show will not go on. But it depends on them if they decide,” he added.

Industrial action is an innovative if unconventional solution, but it has one major drawback; the benefits players have already leveraged.

Unlike other industries, soccer’s workforce has been very effective in ensuring they get a substantial amount of the revenue raised by their employers.

The state of affairs was described rather crudely by former Tottenham Hotspur chairman Lord Alan Sugar as the ‘prune juice effect.’

“The more money that is given to the clubs, the more money is spent on players,” he said in the wake of a $6 billion broadcasting deal recently signed by the Premier League.

“Anyone who knows the effect of prune juice, it is pretty simple, it goes in one end and comes out the other and that is exactly what is going to happen with this money.

“A deal is a deal. I suppose the Premier League hierarchy have done a good deal in squeezing the most amount of money out of broadcasters and someone has done a very, very good job so I suppose they are happy.

“Will they be happy in a year when all the money they have got they have given to players and players’ agents is another story.”

This is the issue striking players face. The average Premier League athlete’s wages equate to close to $100,000 per league game, so it is hard to make the case that they should play less.

Even if a team progresses in nearly all the competitions it is possible to compete in and plays around 60 games, as Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City did last year, the figures per match are still high.

The average salary at the Treble Winners equated to nearly $150,000 per game.

When you consider only the most valuable players, and therefore most well-rewarded, actually feature in 60-plus games the exact figure of earnings per appearance is likely to be even more favorable than this.

Now, as Pep Guardiola might well counter, this is not a matter of finance this is about player welfare.

The Tipping Point?

The 2022/23 campaign is providing a glimpse at the effects an elongated previous season has as Manchester United boss Erik Ten Hag explained.

“We already expanded the squad this season because we make the reason clear. We had a World Cup in the middle of the season, we had a longer season, we had to play a longer season as well, with FA Cup. A shorter break,” he said.

“Every time the schedule is expanding, the load on the players is too much, it’s such a great overload. Many colleagues of mine have pointed to that and I have pointed to that as well.

“But it keeps going. We keep expanding the schedule. Anywhere, it won’t stop. Players can’t deal anymore with this overload and I think that’s what you say in this squad at the moment.”

Ten Hag, like most managers in the league, blames the schedule for his having to deal with the absence of many stars, including Luke Shaw, Lisandro Martinez and Mason Mount.

His plight is far from unique, just a couple of months into this campaign there are 112 injuries across the English top flight, according to PremierInjuries.com.

That’s around a fifth of the entire league on the sidelines.

Ultimately, an increase in the number of unavailable stars might be what starts to limit the number of games. The current 112 incapacitated players cost the clubs a collective $32 million a month.

Action to cut the schedule might also be prompted by a reduction in quality.

If a proportion of the league’s top stars are always sidelined would as many tune in to watch? Would sponsors queue for commercial partnerships as readily?

The answer is probably yes.

Maybe Guardiola is right and the only way for the world to see just how much of a toll the exhaustive fixture list poses is collective action.