When Chelsea talk about “managing minutes,” it sounds like PR. But Howden’s latest injury report actually puts a number on it: Chelsea’s injuries ran 44% higher from June through October than the same stretch last season. That’s the Club World Cup window and everything that followed—which is kind of the whole story.
The raw count: 23 injuries between June 1 and October 31. Seven happened during the Club World Cup itself. What we’re really looking at here is the compression of the only part of the year that used to belong to recovery and preseason work. That time is gone now, or at least it’s shrinking fast.
Howden’s estimate of what Chelsea “lost” from injured absences—basically wages paid while players were unavailable—hit about $22.8 million by October. Compare that to what they won: roughly a quarter of their $107.3 million Club World Cup prize money, and more than a third of the prior season’s wage-loss figure. You can argue with the methodology (wage cost isn’t the same as competitive cost), but the direction is hard to dismiss.
The report shows that Manchester City has faced 22 injuries since June, while Paris Saint-Germain isn’t far behind with 19 injuries, including seven during the tournament. It really feels like summer isn’t much of a break anymore; it’s turning into a long stretch of competition that gets in the way of the regular season.
Across Europe’s top five men’s leagues, Howden says clubs recorded 22,596 injuries over the past five seasons, with wage costs totaling about $4.0 billion. The Premier League accounts for 24% of those injuries.
Manchester United leads the league with roughly $207.2 million in injury wage costs across five years, which—given everything else about United lately—tracks. But here’s the number that actually matters: Premier League forwards under 21 sustained an injury every 120 minutes of competitive domestic football in that sample. Every 120 minutes. That’s the age group clubs are supposed to be building around.
A World Cup on the calendar, and the season that follows it
The calendar problem isn’t just about what clubs lose in a single autumn. It’s about what players carry into the next international cycle—and whether anyone’s actually accounting for it. In a separate FIFPRO workload analysis, Chelsea and PSG were flagged as the teams hit hardest by the calendar crunch after the Club World Cup. Both clubs’ holiday periods shrank to barely three weeks. Chelsea players got 13 days of preseason. PSG players got seven. For reference, experts in that same report agreed on a basic standard: 28 days of offseason rest, another 28 of preseason. So we’re not even close.
Those numbers matter for 2026 because the World Cup runs June 11 to July 19. Players who go deep into July—semis, finals—are eating directly into the window that medical and performance staff normally use to rebuild strength, deal with chronic issues, and build fitness safely before the club season starts again. Long-term tracking in elite football shows muscle injury rates climb when recovery time between matches shrinks. Higher total injury rates when teams play with four or fewer days of recovery compared to six or more. None of this is speculative at this point.
One key part of the conversation about player workload often gets overlooked: it’s not just about the fatigue from playing too much in a single match. The effects spill over into other areas—training quality suffers, strength workouts get cut back, and clubs start making temporary fixes that push back proper rehabilitation. FIFPRO’s report points out that travel and international windows make it even worse, especially when there’s little time for recovery after national team commitments. All of this just adds up and compounds the problem.
A World Cup year lives or dies on player availability, and that availability gets decided months earlier by how much rest players actually get.
What we should really be watching is the 2026–27 season. It follows a summer where the sport’s most-used players will have the least time to reset. Clubs with real depth and disciplined load management will have an edge—not from any tactical breakthrough, but because the calendar has turned recovery into something you either take seriously or pay for later. That’s the situation now, whether anyone wants to say it plainly or not.
