The scourge of the European season is once again upon us. International break is quite possibly the bane of all our existences, but it continues to turn up like a bad penny.
Just as the season starts to pick up some momentum, we get another interruption from the pesky international teams, who insist on depriving us from club football at least for a fortnight.
Here are seven reasons we just don’t want the international break to come around.
1 No weekend football
The weekends are usually meant for football matches and could become extremely boring without them. Aside Africa and probably North America, national team football is not played on Saturdays and Sundays. These games are instead held on Fridays and then the following Tuesday – which makes for an entirely dull and gloomy weekend.
2 No Premier League
After a long, hard week at work, don’t you sometimes just need to sit back, relax and watch the most entertaining football league in the world? The international break just makes it all so difficult, because the games are all scheduled for inconvenient times of day, and who wants to wake up at 4am to watch Argentina play against Bolivia anyways? Just let us watch Manchester United derby on Saturday afternoon and give us our weekends back!
3 Boring and one-sided fixtures
European champions, Portugal, defeated minnows, Gibraltar, 5-0 on Thursday in an international friendly. It was the first time Fernando Santos’ side were appearing after their heroics at the 2016 European Championship in France. However, it was an absolutely boring and one-sided affair considering both sides are separated by about 180 places in the FIFA Rankings. This is the kind of games we get to see during the international break and we can’t just help but wonder the essence.
4 Breaks your club’s run
This one can actually work both ways. First, the international break might halt the winning streak of some clubs. For example, both Manchester clubs are in superb run right now in the Premier League having won all their first three games – but could start to falter after the break. Whereas teams like Arsenal and Leicester City who haven’t been in the best of forms, could benefit from the break to start their own streak.
5 No more betting
One of the great ways to make money is to add a bit of spice to weekend fixtures by spending money on a 14-way accumulator. This is a great way to make yourself some serious cash if you are especially good at predicting scores. However, when international break comes around, the results are far less predictable due to a lack of knowledge about some of the teams involved. So why can’t the club season just resume and allow us a bit more luck?
6 Players return injured
Lionel Messi on return to international football with Argentina, picked up a knock which will definitely have an effect on his club, Barcelona. This is the dilemma of club football managers each time the international break comes knocking. These ones release their best players for their national teams who in turn show up with injury bugs – no wonder the long-standing feud between club and country.
7 No Fantasy Football
A week without club football also means that it’s a week without fantasy football. The only thing that can ever happen to your fantasy team over international weekend is that one of your players may pick up an injury. Remember when your captain, Diego Costa, missed all that action thanks to the injury he picked up with Spain?
