Erling Haaland and Mohamed Salah’s brilliant early-season form illustrates why footballers must get proper rest periods, union chief Maheta Molango has said.
The forwards have looked in great shape for their clubs Manchester City and Liverpool, with Haaland scoring seven in the Blues’ opening three games and Salah notching three goals and three assists for the Reds.
Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), says that is down to both players getting a meaningful summer break, with neither involved in a close-season international tournament.
A new Player Workload Monitoring (PWM) report by world players’ union FIFPRO highlights the burden placed on other players. Two of Haaland’s City team-mates last season, Julian Alvarez and Phil Foden, played in 75 and 72 matches respectively for club and country.
Molango has been out meeting players over the summer and said: “I found astonishing the difference there was in terms of the feedback from the people who had a proper holiday, from the feedback of the people who did not have a proper holiday.
“The body language and the words they chose in talking to us was so different.
“I think for us in England, we have a very clear example, or two examples, probably one is Haaland.
“It’s very nice to go to a dressing room and hear someone say to you, ‘I was missing being back. I was missing being able to train again. And I’m pumped up, I’m motivated. I’m here’. And that was in pre-season.
“Now you see the result. He is back to being the machine that we saw when he first joined us in England. It’s probably something very similar to Mo Salah, he had a proper rest and you can see it’s the best version of Mo.”
On players he had spoken to who had not had a proper break, Molango said: “You can see they look shattered. They look tired before even starting the season which for us is very worrying.”
Haaland may be fresh and rested now, but he may not get another summer like it again until 2027. City have qualified for next summer’s Club World Cup, while Haaland will be hoping to make his World Cup debut for Norway in 2026.
Molango says world players’ union FIFPRO has “red lines” on player welfare which should be the starting point when determining how the football calendar looks.
Those are a maximum of between 50 and 60 matches per season, depending on a player’s age, a maximum of five or six weeks’ worth of consecutive back-to-back matches – which are defined as two or more games in a single week – and a mandatory minimum off-season rest period of three weeks.
“(When competition organisers ask) ‘what do we need to remove?’, (we say) you tell us!” Molango said.
“This is the red line, we don’t have any favourite – Nations League or Champions League or whatever, but we need to protect the product. You tell us what the solution should be, but those are the red lines.
“That’s the way it should be done, not the other way around. We start from protecting the show, and then try to figure out how they can fit within that, within those red lines. As opposed to right now, which is people creating competitions, then they’re scrambling to see how they can fit within that madness.
“We need to protect the players from themselves. they love playing, because they are committed to playing because they are also competitors, you know, and they don’t want to lose their starting spot.
“Another thing that for us is worrying is the trend where coaches are forced to give them time off at the beginning of the season or during the season, because it’s going to end up harming domestic competitions especially.
“For us it’s alarming when you hear (Real Madrid coach Carlo) Ancelotti saying ‘I may need to give players time out during the season’. I as a fan pay 100 per cent of a season ticket, I may end up in a situation where I don’t see 100 per cent of the show, I see a fraction of it.”
FIFPRO is currently involved in two separate legal cases against FIFA over what it sees as a lack of consultation over the international calendar. The first claim in the Belgian courts seeks to establish whether players’ rights as employees have been breached, while the second complaint to the European Commission will argue that FIFA has abused a dominant position under competition law.
