Tear down the World Cup wallcharts, dust off the season tickets: the Premier League is back, and there is a feeling within the game that the next five months will be unlike anything we have ever seen before.
For the biggest Premier League clubs, especially, it is impossible to know how their players will handle the sudden change of demands. At Chelsea, for example, midfielder Mateo Kovacic has played 638 minutes of competitive World Cup action since his last club match. Jorginho, his midfield partner, has played zero competitive minutes in the same time.
Which is better? Would you rather your players were undercooked or overcooked? The medical teams usually want their stars to be on an even keel, which is why unused substitutes are so often forced into dreaded running drills at the end of matches. Now, these squads are unbalanced and unsteady. Expect some strange team selections in the weeks to come.
Such is the relentlessness of the fixture schedule, there are currently only three vacant midweeks built into the calendar before the final round of league fixtures on May 28. For the teams involved in European competition, these punishing months will be the ultimate test of resources and resilience.
An extreme yet illustrative example is that, depending on their success in various competitions and potential cup replays, it is possible that Manchester United could have to play another 40 matches this season, in the space of just 156 days. The threat of burnout – physical and mental – is frighteningly real.
The immediate priority for managers is, as ever, points. Few teams can afford a slow start to this second part of the campaign, and the players who have been in Doha must quickly jump from one treadmill to the other.
In the medium and long-term, however, there is a fear of what might come and what sort of physical toll will be taken on the minds and bodies of these players. A large part of this fear stems from the unfamiliarity of the current situation. Football clubs and managers like to be in control, to know exactly what is happening and how their players are feeling. This year, at this stage of the season, they can only guess at what might be best.
“Obviously it is going to be difficult to get the balance right,” said Graham Potter, the Chelsea head coach. “We are all learning, because it has never happened before. We don’t know how that is going to go. We have got to constantly evaluate the players and assess them, because you might get two or three months down the line and think ‘hang on a minute, we need to do something here to refresh’. We don’t know how it is going to play out.”
The logical conclusion is that the teams with the deepest squads will be the ones who find it easiest to cope. That bodes well for Manchester City, who are five points behind Arsenal but will still be, in the eyes of many, the favourites to lift the title.