Why are football's player unions so powerless compared with U.S. sports?

FIFA president Gianni Infantino spent much of the summer strolling around the U.S.

at the Club World Cup, usually either following President Donald Trump or being followed by a group of football legends ready to declare how brilliant his latest idea is.

But as players wilted in the heat and games were delayed by extreme weather conditions, some were keen to offer an alternative view.

Advertisement What was presented as a global festival of football, said a statement by Sergio Marchi, the president of global players union FIFPro, was nothing more than a fiction staged by FIFA, driven by its president, without dialogue, without sensitivity and without respect for those who sustain the game with their daily efforts.

Punchy.

Marchi went on to refer to the tournament as a grandiloquent staging that inevitably recalls the bread and circuses of Neros Rome and said the inequality, precariousness and lack of protection of the real protagonists deepens.

The language may have been a little florid, but Marchis statement served a purpose.

This tournament was the latest and perhaps most trumpeted example of something FIFPro has been talking about for years: the crowded international football calendar and the increasing demands being placed on footballers.

Its the sort of thing you would expect a players union to be vocal about, and ideally change.

The problem is, their efforts to get the global football authorities to do anything tangible have been frustrated.

And not for the first time.

Which raises the question: why is it so hard for FIFPro, and other player unions, to gain traction in football? FIFAs governance model allows them to do whatever they want, Alex Phillips, FIFPros secretary general, tells The Athletic .

Theyre a law unto themselves.

Its not just FIFA: this happens on a national level, and we see this quite a lot where the federation or the league dont like what the union is saying because theyre challenging their power.

A perfect illustration of this came after Marchis statement and the farcical situation where Infantino held a meeting to discuss the calendar issue, with some representatives from players unions present, but not FIFPro.

Advertisement Apparent union members from Brazil, Spain, Ukraine, Mexico, Switzerland, Ivory Coast, Latvia, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic were all present instead.

FIFPro had been involved in some lower-level discussions about the football calendar, but were not invited to this more high-profile discussion.

After that meeting, FIFA announced a consensus had been reached, that players must have at least 72 hours of rest between matches and there should be at least 21 days of rest at the end of each season.

Which is fine (even though FIFPro says it should be at least 28 days at the end of each season), but the FIFA press release went on to say these stipulations should be managed individually by each club and the respective players.

Why were FIFPro left out of a meeting like this? According to Marchi, the man at the top is the problem.

The biggest obstacle is the autocracy of the FIFA president, who doesnt listen he lives in his own world, Marchi told The Athletic this week .

He believes that only the big spectacles are the ones that bring importance.

And we feel that hes not listening to the voices of all the football players, to the needs of the players.

Its great that we have a World Cup, a Club World Cup, or any world championship because its a wonderful celebration, but that celebration wasnt created by him.

It was created by the players and the spectators, the fans.

Hes simply a manager, not the owner of it.

But thats not the most important thing.

Whats important are all the players around the world, and Ive clearly told him this Ive said it to his face.

A FIFA statement on Friday read: FIFA is extremely disappointed by the increasingly divisive and contradictory tone adopted by FIFPro leadership as this approach clearly shows that, rather than engaging in constructive dialogue, FIFPro has chosen to pursue a path of public confrontation driven by artificial PR battles which have nothing to do with protecting the welfare of professional players, but rather aim to preserve their own personal positions and interests.

Advertisement The global football community deserves better.

Players deserve better.

The statement discussed the summit, stating they had made unsuccessful efforts to bring FIFPro to the table in an environment of non-hostility and respectful, progressive dialogue.

It also said FIFA are looking to introduce measures whereby players and player unions are represented in FIFAs standing committees and the possibility of them participating in FIFA Council meetings when players matters are being addressed.

FIFA sources, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, also said that the world governing body made a genuine effort to engage with Marchi and FIFPros new leadership when welcoming them to FIFA headquarters in Zurich in January of this year.

For anyone used to observing how unions work in American sports, all of this would seem very strange.

In America, most sports literally cannot go ahead without a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) being reached, something negotiated between the league and the players unions.

In baseball, there are already strong fears that the 2027 season will be disrupted and the players could go on strike, largely because of anticipated differences between the parties over salary caps in the next CBA negotiations, which have been desired by the clubs for some time but are the ultimate line in the sand for players.

The 1994 season was curtailed (the World Series didnt take place) and the start of the 1995 season was delayed because of a dispute involving salary caps, which has echoes in the anticipated issues for 2027.

Its happened in other sports, too.

The 2004-05 NHL season was cancelled over a similar disagreement related to salary caps, while the start of the 2011-12 NBA season was delayed due to disputes over the sports CBA.

The NFL also suffered a player lockout in 2011 over a variety of issues, although that was confined to the off-season and no actual games were lost.

Advertisement The point is that in those cases, the players unions had the power to bring the whole sport to a halt.

In football, those at the top of the sport can afford to ignore them.

One of the main reasons for this is those big U.S.

sports are closed markets, operating in a single country.

There are places other than America for baseball or basketball or hockey, but the elite level is so far above everything else that its essentially the only place to play.

In football, its very different: a player can go almost anywhere they want, which is broadly a positive, but reduces leverage when it comes to disputes with the governing powers.

We need to keep in mind that were in an open market here, unlike the U.S., says Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association in the UK.

This is the problem we have, in comparison to U.S.

sports multiple stakeholders that all utilise the same assets.

By which I mean players and I use the word assets on purpose because thats how the players are treated.

You dont have multiple stakeholders in U.S.

sports, you just have the leagues.

We have many: the leagues, the confederations and then the international bodies.

All of them use the same assets.

And in the case of the crammed international calendar, those stakeholders keep adding games and further commitments for the players.

So youll have UEFA adding extra games to the Champions League, or creating a new competition such as the Conference League, while FIFA is conjuring the Club World Cup out of thin air, or adding more teams (and thus more games) to the proper World Cup.

Throw in clubs shoehorning pre- and post-season tours into the schedule whenever they can, and it becomes like multiple children adding items on to the Buckaroo! mule, with little care given to anything around them.

The unions job to do its best to stop the mule from chucking everything up in the air thus becomes pretty tricky.

They all have their own calendar, which make sense when you look at them individually, but they dont make any sense when you look at them holistically because they dont talk to each other, adds Molango.

We should make clear that the unions are busy with other things as well.

Phillips cites an issue raised by The Athletic recently , about the number of former players going bankrupt, which is something unions help with, along with other post-career services.

When a player lower down the food chain is in dispute with their club, unions step in there, too.

Advertisement But on the biggest issue of the day, the international calendar, the unions have comparatively little leverage.

And perhaps the biggest single reason is that wide-scale industrial action is incredibly difficult.

Industrial action from players has been mentioned in passing, as vague threats around certain issues.

In September 2024, Rodri said that strikes were close in protest against the overwhelming international calendar, and that players will have no other option if more games keep being added.

That was particularly notable because he was speaking a few days before he was ruled out for the remainder of the season after damaging ligaments in his knee: it cant be definitively proven that this was a consequence of him playing 67 games for club and country over the preceding year, but such a workload cant have helped.

But no large-scale, international strikes have materialised, partly because its incredibly difficult.

You have to negotiate the different labour laws in different countries, for a start.

Thats enough to give any lawyer a headache.

Getting enough players to align behind an individual issue is tough, and you need either a massive weight of numbers or some high-profile players to sign up to the cause in order to make the relevant authority sit up.

Will anyone in the latter group be willing to risk their own positions, risk their own money, essentially, for something that might not really impact them? The scale of the game is another problem.

Its possible to take industrial action on individual, national levels Colombian players, for example, voted to strike earlier this year but on an international scale, which is the sort of level that you would need to really make FIFA jump, is impractical.

On a technical level, FIFPro also cant organise a strike.

We dont have players as members, says Phillips, so we cant call players and say go on strike because our members are national player unions and national player associations.

In any case, conversations with those involved in the unions suggest there really isnt the appetite to treat strikes as anything other than a final, final step.

No worker wants to stop working and not get paid, says Phillips, so its a final resort when negotiations fail.

Advertisement There perhaps lies one area where the unions could be doing more.

Conversations with players past and present, kept anonymous to allow them to protect relationships, suggested that most werent unhappy with the work their unions did, but felt they could be more proactive, more confrontational, even, with the authorities.

Still, the impetus doesnt have to come from the unions.

Its no longer the unions calling for potential strikes; its the players themselves, says Molango.

The number of issues that could lead to strikes are limited, however those are issues that are so easy for players to feel the consequences of that you shouldnt discount anything.

When youve had players who have suffered an ACL or have mental wellbeing issues because they have played too much, its no longer you convincing them of the need for action.

Its them saying we need to protect ourselves.

Marchi, who, as weve established, is not shy about talking a good game, will perhaps help the perception that the unions are too soft.

But ultimately influence, without resorting to strike action, is what the unions are there for and what FIFPro is looking for.

We have a good relationship with FIFA on an operational level in most departments, but we dont have any decision-making power, says Phillips.

And thats what were fighting for to have a say at the top table, on issues that directly affect players rights.

To have a veto so that we would negotiate those rights, as happens on a national level, together with the clubs.

We need a change in the decision-making process, and U.S.

sports are way ahead of us on that because the players have an equal say on the big issues that affect professional players.

Will they get that? Its hard to see it happening any time soon.

(Top photo: Robert Sanchez cools down with a towel in a hydration break during the FIFA Club World Cup; Photo by Steph Chambers FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images).

This article has been shared from the original article on theathleticuk, here is the link to the original article.