If you've spoken to many football fans this week, you may have found them drifting aimlessly, seemingly without direction. It’s the football international week, and there are many fans who are not happy about it.
It seems like in the past few years, each international week has been greeted with less and less enthusiasm by some fans, who see it as a disruption to the ‘proper’ football; football with club teams. There are a few reasons this might be the case.
Firstly, in many international weeks there aren't always big matches; matches with two top teams playing each other with a lot on the line. With the European Championships being expanded from having 16 teams to 24 teams for Euro 2016, more teams will qualify. This means that qualifying is not that exciting, particularly at the early stage of the process where we are now. England for example, in a qualifying group with Lithuania, Estonia, San Marino, Slovenia, and Switzerland, don’t exactly have a mountain to climb to qualify. With the first and second placed teams qualifying automatically from each group, plus the best third placed team, plus the rest of the third placed teams going into a playoff, not many of Europe’s top teams will be in danger of not making it to the finals.
Another possible reason for the lack of enthusiasm is because international week breaks up the hustle and bustle of the season. Fans used to having several league matches to watch on the weekend, then Champions League and Europa League matches during the week, have to make do with just one or two televised international matches. In addition, Match of the Day, which is usually something to look forward to on Saturday and Sunday nights, is absent from the schedules.
UEFA, trying to freshen up the format, devised a new ‘Week of football’ idea, with qualifying matches taking place over several days over the international week from Thursday to Tuesday. To me however, so far this has just made it more confusing knowing when teams are playing. England played on Thursday and today, Sunday, whereas international matches used to be played on Fridays and Tuesdays.
International week can often seem like an inconvenience. It brings the league calendar, with its weekly drama, to a juddering stop. It is a necessary thing though in the end, to set up the big international tournaments every few years. I'm a big fan of international games; I'm like a kid at Christmas when the World Cup or the European Championships are on. I guess, as with so many things, you just have to get through the boring parts to get to the good stuff.
