Football needs an off season to let other sports shine
It’s 2040: Oasis, needing money once more, have completed a summer series of gigs; Taylor Swift has just finished The Eras Tour: Tokyo Drift; and a 99-year-old Bob Dylan has said his most recent shows were probably his last, but then again, maybe not.
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Fans widely enjoyed the concerts, but were a bit put out they were staged inside the Lee Valley Velodrome. The minimal capacity, they said, created an intimate atmosphere, but wooden banking did make for some strange acoustics.
But Live Nation defended its venue choice. What choice did it have when all of the football stadiums are being used every single weekend?
This weekend’s Tour de France finale can be completed without the use of a stadium and the race will finish, for the 50th time, on the Champs-Élysées.
Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard have developed a classic rivalry that has lit up recent editions of the bike race, and such drama is needed for a sport that is increasingly having its airtime nibbled away by football.
Men’s tennis, too, is fortunate that Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz have so quickly captured public imagination after the retirement of the former ‘big four’.
Sports need their big stars to market themselves, and competition is fiercer than ever.
Where irritated Wimbledon bosses would once every four years have fended off questions from journalists about whether they will screen the World Cup on Henman Hill, there is now at least one major football tournament every summer.
This year's Fifa Club World Cup has added to the never-endingness of the game, with Federico Valverde, for one, having barely taken a day off in 13 months playing 6,000 minutes of football before even arriving in the US for the contest.
And while it is excellent that millions have tuned into the 2025 Women’s Euros, the competition’s end is merely two weeks before the Community Shield and the beginning of the next Premier League campaign.
That gives us a total of three weeks when there is no football on, and that’s if we exclude pre-season games - which give many fans their only chance to see their team.
It’s exhausting for the fans, let alone the players. A capitalist society naturally lends itself to competition in sports.
But when British Athletics struggles to work with West Ham to find a single date for the London Diamond League (to be held at the Olympic Stadium, no less), it does feel a bit unfair.
Do we really need post-season football friendlies? Could Euro 2025 have been held a month sooner? Is the World Club Cup not just an excessive mess?
There are financial reasons for all these things, yet none of them were quite so time encroaching only a few years ago. We’ve seen the creeping of the sports landscape to a point where a sport doesn’t have to be football to have a moment in the sun, but it certainly helps.
Enjoy this weekend’s Tour finale. Watch the US Open, the World Athletics Championships… Take your pick, at this point, watching any sport apart from football is an act of rebellion.
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