da heads bet： Arsene Wenger’s best signing of last season was Alexis Sanchez, so you’d see why Wenger would feel protective of the Chilean attacker.
da roleta： Sanchez is meeting up with his Chile teammates this month ahead of the start of the Copa America this summer, and the Arsenal manager is wary of his prized asset suffering from overexertion. He’s even promised to give Sanchez four weeks off at the start of next season. Burnout is a problem very much a la mode in modern football, but it’s a very real problem.
Wenger does love a whinge, but this time he’s quite right.
Sanchez is part of a large group of players blighted by the modern way. He’s a superstar, one of the best players in the world who plays week in and week out for a top club. He’s a hero in his country, and a hero to many who have no links even to his continent. He flies around the world to fulfill sponsorship obligations and everyone wants a piece of him.
And then there’s the football. Apart from the physical exhaustion of playing and training – not to mention fixture pile-ups – he also plays for his country. But games for Chile take him all over the world – he doesn’t simply get to stay within a short plane ride of his base.
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But that’s not the main problem. All of that is simply an unavoidable part of modern sport. He’s Chilean, Chile’s games are in South America, so Sanchez has to play some games there.
But that’s not quite what Wenger is worried about. Wenger is not so worried about the intensity of Sanchez’s schedule, more about the length of time he’s had to keep it up.
Sanchez played a full season for Barcelona the season before last. Then went to the World Cup with Chile. He was crucial for Arsenal this season and will now fly off to South America once again to play in another tournament. That’s almost three years without a break.
And that’s the modern way. Football is such big business that the big players need to play all the time. The game reaches so many people that we want to see it on our screens all of the time. Sanchez is paying the price for this, and his body might pay the price much later in his life.
There’s no sympathy for footballers who earn tens of millions of pounds per year, and that’s fair enough – if Sanchez is paying the price for his part in modern football, modern football is certainly giving him a fair salary in return.
But sympathy is not what Wenger is complaining about either. He’s complaining about burnout. Fans might not have sympathy for tired players, but their managers have to. Not from a kind and caring point of view, but simply from a pragmatic point of view. One of Wenger’s responsibilities as a manager is to protect his players.
And that’s also a responsibility for football administrators too. In England there is no winter break, players play at a high intensity throughout the whole season. Then the best players go off to summer tournaments and continue that workout. Then it’s pre-season and fitness work and then it’s a new season.
Surely if Sanchez only played in half of those games he’d be a much better player – even two thirds of those games. Wenger isn’t worried about tiredness as such, he’s worried about how tiredness affects performance. And for South American players this summer, who have played in a two full seasons and a World cup already over the last two years it’s going to be a hard summer.
And by the middle of next season, when the rest of Europe gets some sort of break, Sanchez will surely be feeling the effects of two and a half years without an extended period of rest. It’ll be a huge feat of professionalism – and indeed of man management on Wenger’s part – if Sanchez can perform for a whole season next year. And given how crucial he was to Arsenal this season, it’s easy to see how Wenger could be upset.
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