Is the Club World Cup to blame for Chelsea, PSG injury crisis?

What do Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid have in common? Of the many answers to that question, two are particularly pertinent right now: First, they’ve all been afflicted by copious and curious injuries early this season; second, they all played competitive football deep into the summer while contesting the latter stages of the newly formatted FIFA Club World Cup, which Chelsea won on July 14.

Never before have European club teams extended their seasons so far beyond May — with the exception of the COVID-19 pandemic a few years ago — and never before have club medical departments been so understandably vexed by the simple idea of keeping their players fit and healthy.

PSG took on Barcelona this month in what should have been a blockbuster Champions League tie, yet the absence of five players who started the 5-1 final victory over Inter Milan in May — Ousmane Dembélé, Désiré Doué, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, João Neves and Marquinhos — dampened the occasion a little.

A handful of days later, Chelsea fans grimaced as Benoît Badiashile and Josh Acheampong limped out of what was, eventually, a sensational 2-1 victory over Premier League champions Liverpool. And they add to an already jaw-dropping list of injuries: Cole Palmer is on his second muscle strain of the campaign; Liam Delap has sustained a Grade 2 hamstring pull; Dário Essugo has had surgery on his thigh; Tosin Adarabioyo, Wesley Fofana and Andrey Santos all missed the game with knocks; and Levi Colwill‘s ACL tear has already ruled him out for most of the season.

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Real Madrid have fared a bit better, but have already been forced to overcome a mini-crisis at right back, as Dani Carvajal‘s fitness has suffered and, like Delap, new arrival Trent Alexander-Arnold has already suffered a Grade 2 hamstring injury.

Fluminense, the other Club World Cup semifinalists, are not suffering, but they’re a separate case. The league in Brazil runs from March to December, so they entered the tournament midway through their season, fit and firing, and they also have a huge squad to deal with the typical rigors of the Brazilian Serie A campaign (they’ve used 37 players so far.)

But while they were prepared for the grueling summer tournament, even Europe’s richest and finest could not possibly be. There’s no doubt the Club World Cup has wrought havoc for the three European teams who got the furthest. But is it entirely to blame for their injury situations?

An impossible situation

Chelsea beat PSG 3-0 in the Club World Cup final on July 14 — a match that finally brought a stop to a season that lasted 355 days for the Blues and 357 days for Les Parisiens. Then, roughly 20 days later, at the start of August, both clubs reported for preseason — and in what has proved to be something of a dark omen, Chelsea defender Colwill tore his ACL on the first day of training.

The Blues squeezed two friendlies on back-to-back days into a tight two-week preparation period, then opened the 2025-26 Premier League season at home to Crystal Palace. PSG didn’t even bother with friendlies and kicked off their campaign even earlier, as they played the chaotic UEFA Super Cup final against Tottenham Hotspur on Aug. 13 (winning 4-3 on penalties after a 2-2 draw in normal time).

Meanwhile, Madrid began preseason on the same day as Chelsea, played one friendly against Austrian outfit WSG Tirol, and failed in their appeal to have their first LaLiga fixture, against Osasuna, postponed due to a lack of preparation time — though they did play it on the following Tuesday rather than the weekend. In total, they banked a precious six extra days compared to the finalists.

ESPN presented the raw details of the schedules that Chelsea, PSG and Real Madrid were forced to battle with to several professionals within the game. The reactions varied from disbelief to grave concern.

Paul Bower is a physical performance coach at MLS side CF Montréal and doctoral researcher in training periodization strategies at Leeds Beckett University. He shook his head as the schedule was read out, telling ESPN that this situation is effectively unprecedented.

“No one in football had any experience of what a Club World Cup would do to preseason preparations,” he said. “Not in the sense of a club squad being together for such a prolonged period of time. Their [PSG, Chelsea and Real Madrid’s] seasons started last July, in 2024, and are still going.

“Two to three weeks off is not enough to ‘detrain.’ Essentially, it takes about four weeks for players to start to detrain.”

Detraining is effectively resting, or as Bower put it, “going back to zero.” In order for a professional footballer to reset between seasons, they need to lose fitness and physical ability, separate from the sport psychologically, then rebuild it steadily in time for the next campaign.

“If you’re off for a week or so, it’s basically just a break,” he added. “You’re not actually going back down to ‘zero.’ The players won’t have decompressed from an emotional and psychological point of view.”

Bower says the clubs’ medical departments would have been forced to make an educated guess at what kind of schedule might work, but ultimately he admitted there was no truly workable solution. “I wouldn’t lay any blame or any fault with anyone associated with either football club,” he concluded. “It’s almost impossible.”

Dave Carolan, a 30-year veteran of sports science in the game and current advisor to players’ union FIFPro, concurred: “These are some of the most well-resourced clubs in the world in terms of facilities, squad sizes and quality, levels and quality of staff and resources to ensure that no stone is left unturned. Yet, the human body and mind are still finite to the degree to which overload may manifest itself.

“The clubs ultimately had very little option and became stuck between enabling rest time or beginning preseason training. Both clubs tried to provide close to three weeks of rest, however the problem is that this came at the expense of the crucial retraining period.”

What should a preseason campaign actually look like?

Every club in the world prepares for a new season in some way, but the bigger ones have more commercial obligations to fulfill that can seriously add to their travel. Arsenal headed to Singapore and Hong Kong; Liverpool to Hong Kong and Japan; and Manchester United to the United States.

“First of all, an ideal preseason wouldn’t involve mass travel to far corners of the world — but this is happening as well,” Bower said. “It might only have a small impact at the time and in the weeks after, but that accumulates.

“Preseason off the back of adequate rest is the most important thing. How many days is that? Here’s a rule of thumb: You need as much preparation time as you’ve had rest. So if you have six weeks off, generally, you need six weeks “on” — that’s preseason prep — before your first competitive game. If your offseason is four weeks, you’ll probably need four weeks prep.”

Carolan researched and contributed to a recent FIFPro report on player health. Its conclusion echoed Bower’s methodology, calling for a mandatory 28 days’ rest and 28 days’ preparation between seasons. And he stressed to ESPN that his call is for a minimum number, one that would ideally be even higher.

“Psychological rest is the key,” Bower said. “Your physical ability goes up because your brain is better rested. It’s a difficult connection to quantify, but if you’re burnt out and exhausted, you take a break, and then you feel reinvigorated.”

In a difficult situation, Chelsea, PSG and Real Madrid all seemed to break away from the even principle of rest and preparation, prioritizing the former.

An additional sports scientist, who spoke to ESPN under the condition of anonymity, suggested that may have been with an eye on providing the required psychological rest, accepting that the first few games of the league season would regrettably form part of the preparation.

While far from ideal, it is possible for PSG to overpower Nantes, Angers and Toulouse in a semi-prepared state given the talent gap between them and the rest of Ligue 1; the same can be said for Real Madrid and their opening bouts with Osasuna, Real Oviedo and Real Mallorca in LaLiga. Both teams won all three matches.

However, for Chelsea, who play in the much more competitive top-to-bottom Premier League, it’s less feasible. They labored to a 0-0 draw with Palace on the opening day and needed a confirmed VAR error to help them to a 2-0 win over Fulham.

Despite their best efforts, time worked against all three clubs. They simply did not have enough to reset. In such a short preseason window, as Bower put it, “you’re not doing any proper preparation work there.”

A calendar crisis

PSG and Real Madrid may have successfully negotiated those opening fixtures but, predictably, the injuries began to pile up in the subsequent games — especially for the former.

Perhaps the positioning of September’s international break did not help here as, after being carefully nursed through August, Dembélé and Doué got injured on duty for France.

This led to some strong words from PSG, who stated they “provided the [French] Federation with concrete medical information on the workload its players could bear and the risk of injury” and “deplores the fact that these medical recommendations were not taken into account by the French national team’s medical staff, as well as the total lack of consultation and consultation with its medical teams.”

When presented with this and asked if this could have been avoided, Bower shrugged and said “only if France didn’t pick those players. But then you’ve got to win; they’ve got a World Cup to prepare for. This is the situation we’re in.”

The “situation” here is what Carolan calls a “calendar crisis.”

“Those governing the calendar should bear the majority of responsibility,” he says. “Any new tournament, integrated into an already overloaded global calendar, cannot disregard the health and wellbeing of players.

“I would be gravely concerned for the short- and long-term health of the players. To see injuries occur in these situations is not surprising, but is understandable and, to some extent, predictable.”

For Chelsea, PSG and Real Madrid, the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons are effectively one, long, conjoined campaign. Without adequate rest and preparation in between, the players’ minds and bodies will feel like they’re in month 15 of a season, not month three. And they’d be right to feel that way.