Weston-super-Mare’s ground, the Optima Stadium, holds around 3,500 fans. It was last packed to the rafters when Doncaster Rovers arrived a decade ago, a convincing defeat hardly dampening the night’s magnitude. Had the clock stopped at 90 minutes in their FA Cup first round tie at Bristol Rovers on Saturday, a 1-1 draw would have guaranteed an occasion unmatched in their 137‑year history. The National League South side would have hosted a competitive derby against one of the local giants for the first time; broadcasters would almost certainly have been interested and the five‑figure windfall would not have harmed long-term ambitions to redevelop their home.
Instead the tie went to extra time and, as should be expected from a decently resourced League One team against flagging legs, Rovers pulled two goals clear. Weston-super-Mare’s time in the sun was over and, barring an unprecedented rise through the divisions, they will not hit radars again until whenever the FA Cup draw next falls in their favour. As a timely thread on X pointed out over the weekend, they were one of five non-league teams that missed out on a home replay for identical reasons. That would not have been the case before the Football Association’s decision in April that all FA Cup fixtures must be decided at the first time of asking, justified primarily by the imminent strain from expanded Champions League and Club World Cup competitions on those higher up the chain.
Earlier in the week, somewhere inside Fifa’s bunker-like HQ in Zurich, the button was pushed on a press release announcing a new player welfare taskforce. It will be led by Arsène Wenger, with the stated intention that clubs, FAs, players’ unions, leagues and confederations get around the table to discuss a problem that risks eating the sport whole. The calendar is becoming unsustainable and almost everyone agrees on that. The question is what buckles next: in England it was, of course, the smallest clubs who had to feel the squeeze when the authorities felt pressure from an elite whose air miles are racking up.
With that question comes an existential debate about football’s governance. The Fifa announcement was timed conveniently, a fortnight after European Leagues and Fifpro had accused it of “abusive and anti‑competitive” conduct in exploiting its stranglehold over the schedule. They submitted a formal complaint to the European Commission and slated Fifa, although much less Uefa, for refusing to engage meaningfully with other stakeholders on matters such as the Club World Cup’s growth to 32 teams. It comes at a time when everything, be it the transfer system or the structure of the biggest club competitions, is on the table as never before.
So it falls, nominally at least, on Wenger to lasso the competing parties into recommendations that make the game better. Finding a balance that manages fixture congestion while serving the sport from grassroots upwards is the utopian endgame but the challenge may prove insurmountable. Some within players’ unions, for example, would compromise on the bloated fixture list if clubs were allowed to expand their squads. The biggest clubs would accept cuts to the schedule as long as their European and global paydays are not harmed. Leagues will fight for their lives to prevent the sanctity and size of their domestic competitions from being jeopardised. How can texture be added to what, for many involved, is a single issue?
As far as his influence extends, Wenger may have to decide where his own sensibilities lead. His commitment to growing the sport, towards dealing opportunities to the unearthed or unheard, was beyond question during his managerial career and evidently came from the right place. Anyone spending time in his company would have understood that. His appointment in 2019 as Fifa’s chief of global development outwardly made sense for exactly those reasons. But, whether consciously or not, personal ideals can too easily be warped to serve an institution’s priorities. Before even broaching his previous support for a biennial World Cup, it is hard to read Wenger’s past comments regarding the Club World Cup and hold much hope that the dial is about to move.
Last December he came out firmly to bat for the tournament with a set of arguments that began ominously with: “I accept that the football calendar is a busy one, but …” Wenger explained most issues away by citing improvements in player welfare and injury prevention. “It will increase resources for clubs all over the world to develop and to compete,” he said, naturally oblivious back then that uncertainty surrounding its financial value would still be swirling almost a year later. “There is demand for big competitions in football and there has been a good support for this one.”
He did not sound like a man overly worried by the knock-on effects of this sprawling imposition on the calendar. But expanding in one direction seems, at this point, like a one-way ticket towards further contracting in another. No European giant will willingly scale back their number of big‑ticket continental match-ups now, nor their quantity of transatlantic flights if the financial rewards are evident. There is a nagging sense that, whatever has caused the renewed urgency to sit down and thrash things out, much of the hot air may be for nought.
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With Fifa and Uefa, who announced on Tuesday their own deal with Fifpro to give players more say in football’s running, both listing under legal and intellectual scrutiny, it is hardly a huge push to imagine the super-rich owners using these unsettled times to bend things further their way. Their ideal direction does not involve nights of the kind for which Weston‑super-Mare’s loyal band of supporters may have waited a lifetime.
The quixotic hope must be that Wenger, and those setting the agenda with him, can pick out some light in a tunnel that, for all the concerns and valiant intentions of those taking football’s shape to task, is darkening for all bar the most privileged few.
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