Top Premier League stars may be at breaking point fears Alan Shearer
Alan Shearer thinks football’s elite players may be at “breaking point” amid an increasingly demanding calendar.
Shearer believes the cracks are already starting to show, and players’ unions are so concerned they have initiated two separate legal actions against FIFA over what they see as a lack of consultation on the fixture schedule and its impact on player welfare. “When you look perhaps at the European Championship just gone by, there wasn’t great quality,” Shearer said at an event to launch Amazon’s Champions League coverage in the UK.
“The best team without doubt won the tournament (Spain), they played the best football by a mile. But when you look at France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Portugal, there wasn’t a great amount of quality, and there has to be a reason for that.
“Is it that players are going into the summer knackered? There has to come a point where it’s breaking point, and perhaps it’s getting to that now.
“It’s important that you keep the quality of the football, because that’s what we all want.
“We all want to watch the best players play the best football, and hopefully we’ll see that in the Champions League this season.
“But there has to come a point – and maybe it is now – where there are too many games. For the top international players to keep going and going and going over a period of so many years is going to be impossible.”
