Manchester City's Spanish midfielder Rodri at a press conference on Sept. 17. Last week, Rodri said he thought a player strike may happen soon.OLI SCARFF/AFP/Getty Images
For a few years there, professional athletes had run out of things to complain about. It’s hard to wedge revenue sharing for millionaires in with climate change and Ukraine and keep a straight face.
But because the world isn’t calming down, some of them have run out of patience. They have a new cause – overwork. Too many games in too few days.
“Yes, I think that we are close to [a strike],” Manchester City’s Spanish midfielder Rodri said last week. “I don’t know what is going to happen, but it is something that worries us because we are the guys who suffer.”
Last year, Rodri played 50 games for City. He was paid $20-million – about $400,000 a shift. This doesn’t account for travel via private jet and the time he spends in the cryo chamber thinking about shoe deals.
Maybe you’re reading this on the train or the bus. You’re thinking about how you’ve got to do 10 indispensable life-admin tasks in the 45 minutes you have for lunch. Then you’ve got to sprint home at 6 p.m. so you can get there before your kids burn the house down.
What I’ll bet you’re not thinking is, ‘At least I don’t suffer like a professional athlete.’
It’s true that the modern soccer professional plays more than his typical predecessor. The better he is, and the better his team is, the more he plays. A really top pro can now play most of the calendar year with only a few weeks of vacation. The rest of us call this ‘life.’
This movement, if that’s what it is, was picking up steam fast. Other players echoed Rodri’s Teamster talk. Rodri’s coach, Pep Guardiola, seemed to agree that the players had moral permission to strike, though he did not say they had a good reason to do so.
You could feel the sort of energy that precedes a bad decision. It took Carlo Ancelotti, the cunning operator who runs Real Madrid, to put the tail on this particular donkey.
“Football needs to reflect because the aim is to try to play less games to have less injuries,” Ancelotti said. “If that leads to lowering salaries, the aim is for players to play less games, so I don’t think the players will have any problem to lower their wages if they play less.”
That soft whistling you hear is hundreds of soccer players having a problem with lowering their wages to play less.
Soccer is hard on the body. So’s garbage collecting. You don’t see talking heads on Sky Sports suggesting that you should put out your recycling only once a month.
Players need a new way of humble bragging to their peers. They’ve chosen the route of the insufferable upper-middle-class professional: never stop talking about how busy you are.
Saying it doesn’t make it true. Pros may put in a lot of hours, but they are freed of worry while they do so. Someone else does their laundry and makes their travel arrangements. If they need a cleaning service or a daycare, that is fixed for them. All they have to do is show up and do the job. Everything else in their lives is smoothed over.
That’s why so many of them are disasters once they leave sports. It’s like being tipped off a pier into the breakwater of adulthood.
Like most causes at the top level of sports, this isn’t about the problem being targeted. It’s about status.
There used to be two ways to tell the difference between great players and good ones – money and exposure. The more you made and the more the rest of us saw you, the more you mattered.
Now everyone’s on TV all the time, and the real soccer money is in Saudi Arabia. Getting hold of either one no longer makes you special. Now the truly great ones signal their standing by not working.
Lionel Messi is no longer the best soccer player in the world, but he may be the only one who submits his schedule to his team, rather than the other way around.
Messi will play in Miami in June. But Vancouver in May? Thanks but no thanks.
Whenever someone complains, Inter Miami claims Messi is injured. But his absences curiously coincide with games on the road, and especially games on field turf.
LeBron James used to max out most regular seasons. For the past few years, the basketball star has been averaging about a two-thirds workload. Again, mostly road games. Again, injury or fatigue is often blamed.
These guys aren’t young. They need some cosseting. Until recently, there was a term for this sort of player: retired.
The mark of the true alpha is one who says, ‘Miami? Cincinnati? Toronto? Yeah, that sounds kind of far. Tell you what. I’ll do Wimbledon and Flushing Meadows and then I’ll punch out for the year.’
Being old and tired is the new young and fresh.
Other players have noticed that some people get a choice, and they don’t. They aren’t brave enough to call out the alphas, so they go after the teams instead.
The worst thing that players could get here is the fight they’re itching for. For every settled 30-year-old who insists he can’t possibly go 40 times a year, there will be an 18-year-old who will. That’s an obvious wedge point.
Then there’s the fact that leagues and owners cannot step back. Fewer games means less money, less glory and less control. That’s an existential risk, which gives ownership a better reason to get bloodied up than their employees. What they’ll do is hire more players and pay all of them less.
The people who won’t be affected are the Messis and Jameses of the world. They will get paid even more to work even less. Because life isn’t fair.
This may be the only thing the average pro and the average worker have in common.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Manchester City midfielder Rodri last year was paid $20-million for 34 games, or about $600,000 a shift. He played 50 games, amounting to about $400,000 a shift. This version has been updated.