https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/44414487 Just announced that this will start the season after next. Two week break but staggered in February. Not quite got my head round how that works. However FA Cup 5th Round moves to midweek so that will remove one of our usual weekends off and replays will be scrapped from 5th Round.
Not sure about the timing to be honest. I would have thought if they really wanted to retain the festive games, it would have made sense to have it immediately after. I assume however they have consulted clubs and the conditioning experts to come up this, rather than just ploughing in without any thought of how it will work in practice...
Presumably the staggering means they actually only miss one round of fixtures but every club has a two week gap between games. Maybe they have looked at when most likely time is for weather-related downtime and atuck it then. More likley to get games off in Feb rather than Jan.
So simple in other countries, so difficult here. I'll reserve judgement however until I've seen it in action. I'd imagine the TV companies have made this quite tricky and we are far too scared of upsetting them.
we normally don't get past the 4th round anyways so the replay thing won't make any difference to us. It'll be interesting to see what happens when games get cancelled cos of the weather when roads outside stadiums are deemed dangerous for fans etc which will then create a fixture backlog somewhere. Players will still have to train I would imagine so it's not like they're actually gonna be rested completely. Dunno why we don't just finish the season 2 weeks earlier when players are gonna be buggering off on their jollies. We could also look at playing less pointless bloody friendlies. The season just kicks off and then we have break to play a game against Outer ****ing *****lia, boils my piss it does ! It's a waste of time, it won't have any affect, we won't win Euro 2020 nor will we win the World Cup in 2022 as a result of this.
Of all the things that need fixing in football - primarily the distribution of wealth and ****ed loan system - the big announcements are one extra weekend off for big clubs (let's not forget the fact that most teams get a lot of time off during Intl breaks and later rounds of the cup), no extra time in whatever the hell the "Carabao Cup" is and scrapping the ABBA penalty system (another half-baked, dogshit FA attempt to be clever).
As far as Winter Breaks go, this is no more than a cop-out. The rest of Europe will no doubt be clamouring to follow the lead of the PL, or more likely be having a good laugh.
