Chelsea: UCL expansion will literally hurt the Blues and shortchange fans

The UEFA brain trust thinks 60 games a year are just not enough for the best players under their rule. Chelsea will be one of the teams to see injuries go up and quality go down for no good reason.

Any ol’ busybody can come up with a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. A garden variety imbecile can suggest a course of action that completely misses the target the problem presents. But it takes a truly generational idiot – in fact, it takes a village of said idiots – to develop a plan that simultaneously ignores and exacerbates a problem affecting their entire domain and specifically hastens an outcome they are otherwise trying to avoid. Welcome to the Village of UEFA.

UEFA are reportedly close to changing the format of the Champions League so as to add four more games to the group stage. That their proposal comes while the Bundesliga and La Liga are wrapping up their holiday break and the Premier League emerge from a particularly injury-ridden festive period is an added bonus of no self-awareness. The only way they could have done better would have been announcing it when Liverpool had two squads playing almost simultaneously on two continents in two mandatory tournaments under two different governing bodies.

The last six weeks have seen a near-record level of injuries across the Premier League. Chelsea, at various times, were without Christian Pulisic, N’Golo Kante, Marcos Alonso, Fikayo Tomori, Reece James and Cesar Azpilicueta.

The specific etiology of the injuries is broad, but the common factor, as in any such spurt, is overload combined with partial recovery leading to fatigue and therefore improper mechanics and soft tissue vulnerability. I happen to be particularly educated in such things, but you don’t need to be to figure this out.

UEFA’s proposal will add even more games to this part of the calendar, which will mean more injuries.

The end of the festive period is no guarantee of a respite for Premier League teams, even with the new February break on the horizon. England is the lone “big five” European association (and probably the only one out of all the leagues) with two domestic cups. They are also the only one where one of those cups has two-legged semifinals. On top of that, the other cup has replays in the event of a draw, rather than going straight to penalties. A club that reaches the semifinal of the League Cup and draws their first FA Cup tie has two additional games in January, three if you think the League Cup isn’t worth having.

The EFL is concerned that the top English teams will reach that conclusion and move to withdraw from the competition, citing the increased demands of the new Champions League.

Meanwhile, UEFA is still concerned that the 16 top clubs in Europe will secede and form a standing permanent Super Champions League of some sort. By increasing the cost of being in the Champions League, UEFA is not giving those 16 clubs much reason to stay around for the worsening status quo.

Even the most australopithocene fans who say they would gladly play 60+ games a year and not cry about it if they were multimillionaires should care about this latest proposal.

Few Chelsea fans have ever seen their Blues at their best. The combined schedules of club and country keep the players in a perpetual state of partial fitness and slightly dulled sharpness. Those players who have returned to play after more serious injuries may be holding back out of fear – possibly subconscious – of reinjuring themselves.

Imagine what a fully rested and recovered N’Golo Kante or Eden Hazard could do. Think about how much faster Chelsea could play if they as individuals could accelerate faster and maintain a higher top speed for longer. Consider how much further along they would be tactically if they could truly train between games. Call to mind every complaint you’ve ever had about a Chelsea player, and dream about what the coaches would do with 6-8 additional hours of one-on-one training time with that player on that factor each week.

Chelsea are one of the teams who would pay a high price to pad UEFA’s bank accounts with the revenues from four more games.. The quality of play would decrease, through no fault of the players, and the risks, number and severity of injuries would increase.

We all love watching Chelsea. It’s one of the few things we can agree on. If only we knew how great they could be, if only their overlords would let them be so.