Just as the club football season was building some momentum, the brakes slam on. And boy will we be stuck in park for quite a while now. It will, for instance, be 20 days without the Premier League in which international football takes center stage.
Now is the time of Nations Leagues (CONCACAF and UEFA) and those are some of the highest-stakes games. Mauricio Pochettino's USMNT play four friendlies in this elongated window while top South American nations will also be using this window to take a look at their squad. It is not all quite so low-stakes, however, as in Africa there is the invariably competitive battle for qualification to the Africa Cup of Nations.
In short, club football might be gone for a week longer than usual but there is still plenty to sink your teeth into before the Champions League and European domestic competitions snatch the spotlight back for themselves. Moving to an extended September break was approved by the FIFA Council in March 2023 to be introduced following the 2026 World Cup. That tournament was part of the spur for the reorienting of the international calendar; the fact that the final was the latest ever played in a summer tournament (July 19) meant that domestic leagues were shunted back to late August and would barely have had time to get up and running if the first window remained in its usual position of early September.
Player welfare was also a significant factor in the extension of the early season window, which will mean that international squads do not meet up again until November. In an ever more globalized sport, travel places a significant strain on players, particularly those based at elite European clubs who must travel to the Americas or Asia during the international windows. For instance, in October 2024, Chelsea and Ecuador midfielder Moises Caicedo travelled over 15,000 miles and crossed 10 time zones in the space of a fortnight of club and country commitments.
Though the volume of games may not decrease for players such as Caicedo, they will at least lose one cross-continental journey from their schedules. Within the European domestic season, there are now three windows in which international games will take place: Once the season is concluded, there is a further window from June 7-15 before a summer of international tournaments, including AFCON and the CONCACAF Gold Cup. Through until the end of 2030, the men's international match calendar will retain much the same form, half of the eight games within the club season in that September to early October window before two quick darts through the fixture list in November and March.
The subsequent cycle may need adapting to accommodate the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, widely expected to take place in winter and potentially in early 2035 to avoid the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. As is often the case in the first international window after a World Cup, there is something of a case of after the Lord Mayor's show to proceedings. For many coaches it is the time to plot out the next four-year cycle.
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