The Premier League and Championship have halted for a three-week international break for the first time, longer than the customary two-week pause. The change merges the four games that were previously spread across the old September and October breaks into a single slot, meaning domestic football stops for three weeks rather than four weeks across two separate windows. Club football, in effect, gets a week back.
The trade-off is a long stretch without competitive fixtures for the players who have not been called up by their countries — a significant amount of downtime for finely tuned athletes. Clubs have therefore had to work out how to keep their remaining squads sharp, and the plans vary sharply from one club to the next.
Brentford are a case in point. Most of the squad are away on international duty, leaving about 12 players at the training facility, including Callum Wilson and Igor Thiago, and five of those are coming back from injury. The Bees also have a longer break than almost every other team, having hosted Chelsea on Friday evening. Manager Keith Andrews has given his first-team players a week off with individual training programmes to follow. Those players face no restrictions on leaving the country, although long-haul flights are unlikely to be sanctioned.
The squad will reconvene on Saturday, 26 September to begin training again, before a behind-closed-doors game against another English club on the weekend of 3 October. That friendly could give the likes of Nathan Collins and Sepp van den Berg a chance to return to action, with the rest of the side made up of under-21 players.
The second international break in November will look very different at Brentford. With a home game against Brighton on Sunday, 8 November and another against Everton on Saturday, 21 November, players may get the odd day off but will otherwise follow a normal training programme, with no friendly before the usual preparation for the Everton fixture.
Elsewhere in the Premier League, one club will carry on training with the small number of players who remain, allowing a few days off. Andoni Iraola says he will be left with “no more than three days probably to prepare” for the home game with Manchester City on 11 October.
Aston Villa have taken a very different approach. Unai Emery will return to former club Sevilla, where he won the Europa League three times in a row. Sevilla and Villa will face off in the 15th edition of the Antonio Puerta Trophy on Friday, 2 October. The match is played in memory of the 22-year-old Sevilla wing-back, who died on 28 August 2007 after suffering multiple cardiac arrests on the pitch during a La Liga game against Getafe.
In the Championship, squads are not decimated to anything like the same degree. Blackburn Rovers, for example, have only four players called up, and for manager Tony Mowbray the pause arrives at a helpful moment. Appointed for a second time in June, he has had to contend with an injury crisis in the opening weeks of the season, with more than 10 players ruled out. The break gives Rovers the chance to ease some of them back, among them Gady Beyuku and Moussa Baradji, who have recently made their comebacks, and Scott Wharton, who is close to a return.
After the trip to Portsmouth on Saturday, Rovers headed back to Lancashire and will spend a few days on the training ground this week. Following a busy start to the campaign involving league fixtures and the Carabao Cup, it also gives Mowbray a proper opportunity to work with his players. It will not be all work, though: Mowbray intends to give the squad a few days off from the end of the week, and players such as Yuri Ribeiro will be free to return home to Portugal if they wish. The cycle repeats the following week, with training in the first half and a short break over the weekend, before week three reverts to the usual pre-match routine ahead of the home game against Cardiff. Mowbray is also looking to find a Premier League or League One side to play behind closed doors, which would help those returning from injury get minutes in the bank while keeping the rest of the squad ticking over. In the two-week November break, Blackburn players may still get a short spell off, while matches are more likely to be in-house affairs featuring senior and under-21 players.
League One has a different problem — or rather, a different solution. The division keeps playing unless a club receives three call-ups meeting the EFL’s criteria, at which point a postponement can be requested. Only four of the 12 matches survived on each of the two weekends. Many clubs prepared in advance by scheduling Football League Trophy fixtures across these three weeks; sides tend to rotate in that competition anyway, so the games go ahead even when league fixtures are postponed. Twelve teams will play two trophy ties and 10 clubs will play once. That left only Leyton Orient and Reading at risk of having no game at all, and both have had just one league match called off, so neither will face three empty weeks.