Premier League shoots down Man City summer break request to aid better player recovery for the start of next season.
Manchester City’s plea to postpone the start of the upcoming season in order to give players more time to recover from the Club World Cup has been denied by the Premier League. City’s current season may expire in mid-July as they prepare to compete in the tournament in the United States next summer.
The Premier League has informed City that they will not be making an exception for the reigning champions, who will be joined in America by Chelsea, when they discuss the possibility of starting the 2025–2026 season later than other elite teams.
“The Premier League say yes to us? No, absolutely not,” said Guardiola.
“I don’t know if we will play more games than the treble year [2022-23] before the States. Maybe we’ll play less games. In the end … the Premier League has not allowed us to postpone the first two games for our recovery. Thank you so much. They don’t postpone these games so that will be the moment of ‘Oh, what do we do?’ I don’t have an answer right now because I’ve not been there before. I think we are going to take a decision with common sense. We will see how the players are, the schedule, then we are going to decide.”
Fifa insist participating teams must take their strongest squads to the 32-team competition.
“What is the strongest players? Which ones? If Fifa would tell me, for them, which players are stronger than the other ones. I don’t understand that,” Guardiola said. “We’ll go with all the squad there, we don’t go for one game. I don’t know the competition right now, we don’t go for 11 players, we go for the whole squad. I don’t know how the selection that this player is stronger than the other one.
“Maybe the strongest player for them is in a really bad condition for many reasons: personal, professional, niggles, injuries. And we are going to play other ones. I’m not going to say before the game which player to play. I will decide, that’s for sure.”