Should The Premier League Really Adopt A Winter Break?

The proof of the pudding will, as ever, be in the eating. With the biggest-ever (in terms of volume, at 24 teams) European Championship on the horizon this summer, the ability of Premier League players to punch their full weight in the final stages will come under the microscope.

Concerns are fresh in the memory after the completion of England’s customary crazy Christmas, with the league’s good and great having ploughed through three domestic fixtures in a week, or little more, at a time when the rest of the continent is taking a breather.

A turn-of-the-year rest or lack thereof won’t decide anything in France come June and July, of course—if Germany, the employers of Europe’s longest winter break, add Euro 2016 to their World Cup crown, it will be because of their in-depth excellence as much as anything. Yet if Joachim Low’s players get there, the Deutscher Fussball-Bund’s (DFB) overall planning and preparation—of which the winter break is a small piece—will have played its part (only seven of the World Cup winners played outside the Bundesliga, in case you were wondering).

Whatever, accepted wisdom is that a winter break would help England, whose squad will be almost entirely Premier League-based (Burnley goalkeeper Tom Heaton is the only non-Premier League member of the England squad). Sven-Goran Eriksson spent much of his tenure as England head coach extolling the virtues of it, as reported by the Daily Telegraph in 2007, when the Swede was Manchester City manager.

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It’s hard to imagine it happening soon, though. Even a champion of the idea like Eriksson recognised the reality, saying in that above excerpt that going without Premier League football at Christmas and New Year would be “impossible."

Before we even get into the cultural baggage involved—and it is a rare English football fan indeed who is not excited by a week of festive fixtures, whatever their views on the medium-term implications of the workload—it’s worth reflecting where this judgement is coming from.

Eriksson is canny, and he is a pragmatist. Too much so, some would suggest. He was talking about the commercial implications of binning holiday football, which means a lot in today’s context. More than anything, the Premier League is a commercial behemoth, and the lack of concurrence at Christmas allows it to dominate international schedules even more than it does usually. It’s the only show in town.

Or, at least, it usually is. While nowhere quite matches the intensity of the Premier League over the festive period, the swift resumption of a couple of European leagues could have easily left you wondering whether the whole idea of a winter break wasn’t just a myth.

La Liga had its own "Boxing Day," with a full round of fixtures on December 30, save the derby between Villarreal and Valencia, which was played on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve.

Further west in Iberia, Portugal got cracking again a few days before. Taca da Liga resumed with a pair of games on December 28 involving a trio of top-flight sides including Braga, with os tres grandes of Benfica, Sporting Clube de Portugal and Porto joining in a day later.

Having 31 matches played across its two competitions between December 21 and January 3 was something the Portuguese Liga celebrated on its official website, as it makes baby steps towards a more international outlook. That its Spanish counterpart covets some more of the overseas glare enjoyed by the Premier League is no secret, and this played its part in the rearrangement of fixtures to December 30.

Ostensibly, the rescheduling—which took place in late August, in typically chaotic planning—was to placate national-team coach Vicente del Bosque, who had voiced his concern about the lack of preparation time that would be given to his squad after the club season (as reported here, by the English version of AS), which had been set to finish on the weekend of May 22.

Yet Liga president Javier Tebas made little secret of the fact that the commercial possibilities offered by the switch were just as important, if not more so, from his perspective (as reported here, again by AS, in Spanish). Certainly the prospective international reach mattered more than the convenience of fans; December 30 is not, after all, a public holiday in Spain.

It all begs the question—regardless of what best practice is from a sporting standpoint, is the Premier League’s commercial strength not only dissuading their top brass from adopting a winter break, but gradually convincing Europe to bin it as well?

At this point, it’s worth looking a little more closely at what the rest of Europe’s players actually enjoy in terms of time off. As far as actual holiday goes, few of Europe’s major players enjoyed much more than a week. Even Bundesliga players, who don’t resume until well into January, only got a fortnight. No games doesn’t necessarily mean on the beach. Bayern Munich, for example, resumed training on Monday and are off to Doha for a training camp on January 12, with the league campaign restarting at Hamburg on  January 22.

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That time does go some way, though, in terms of mental as much as physical freshness. Last year’s Ligue 1 runners-up Lyon, who fired coach Hubert Fournier on Christmas Eve, made the most of their pause to go to Spain for a mini-training camp lasting just two-and-a-half days. New boss Bruno Genesio enthused about its effects (as reported here by the club’s official website), and OL looked more spritely than in a couple of months as they thrashed fourth-tier Limoges 7-0 in a potentially tricky Coupe de France tie at the weekend.

If we go back to Eriksson’s words, a winter pause doesn’t need to infringe on tradition. A couple of other European leagues continued their own traditions of festive football before a break. There were Turkish Super Lig matches spread across December 26, 27 and 28 before a freeze until January 16 (easing back in via cup matches on the weekend of January 9), while Belgium enjoyed games on the weekend of December 26/27 before stopping until mid-January too.

One wonders whether, if retained in the next few years, La Liga’s presence in festive football might prompt a Premier League rethink. Whatever happens, there is clear evidence that England can have its commercial cake and eat it. Those few days of respite could make all the difference.