(225) Days of Summer

Why a Summer Calendar Makes Sense

Various news agencies have recently reported that FIFA are investigating the implementation of a summer calendar in football worldwide. People have looked at this with aghast and put two and two together and come to the answer of 22. 2022. Qatar.

People, unsurprisingly, feel that this change is being brought into effect to compliment their proposals (by their I mean FIFA’s, Qatar has continually insisted it can host a summer tournament) to move the 2022 world cup to January/February where the weather conditions are less likely to relate in a tragedy of some sort, clubs refusing to release players or players refusing to travel.

In this man’s humble opinion, this is wrong. This change to the calendar is based on predictive weather patterns that seem to be suggesting that Western Europe’s prevailing westerlies are coming to an end. It’s these anti-trade winds that have, for at least 3 centuries, kept Western Europe especially mild in the winter months.

I’m not saying the end is nigh, so no looting please. But our ‘big freezes’ will become bigger and more prolonged if this hypothesis holds up to be true. Man up I hear somebody from the back shout. Well, attending a football match in conditions of -15c is fun once in a while (see Manchester City vs Everton in December of 2010) but that’s the kind of weather where people can die of exposure in minutes rather than hours. Had an unexpected heavy snow fall taken place during that match I fear people would have perished in the 2 mile hike back to the city centre. I’d also like to take this opportunity to bring to people’s attention Nathan Tomlinson, a young man who went missing recently in Manchester due to such a snow storm and who I’m sure we all hope will turn up safe and well.

Safety

In a country that’s becoming particularly health and safety crazy it’s easy to dismiss the games that are postponed in the winter period as an extension of this. It’s not. These games are cancelled as people’s lives are genuinely in danger when not just attending games but when travelling to and from the stadium.

Cost

Under soil heating is expensive to install and maintain. During cold-snaps unfortunately it’s a necessity to keep games being played, which is why so many games in the lower leagues fall victim to the weather as they cannot afford the costs associated with having any under-soil heating facilities. By moving the footballing calendar to the spring, summer and early autumn months it negates the need for clubs to have this and we will no longer see weeks of Soccer Saturday where Geoff and the boys talk about Countdown rather than the games being played.

Synchronisation

It’s been apparent for the past 20 years that as globalisation of the game has grown then the whole world needs to work from the same calendar. As it stands teams lose important players at a crunch time of the season due to the African Cup of Nations taking place in January. People say why isn’t held in June or July? Well hold it during those months and it would have to be pretty much hosted exclusively in Southern Africa, it’s not feasible to exclude the majority of the continent from ever being able to host the tournament to suit Europe’s calendar.

The reaction of the FA and it’s German counterpart have so far been battles as to who can outdo each other in terms of arrogance. ‘You can’t change 140 years of tradition’ one unnamed fellow bellowed. Now it might just be me, but if you can’t change football should we go back to playing without the offside rule, allowing pass-backs, playing without nets and not being able to use substitutions? What a load of nonsense. The game is constantly evolving and in this blues eyes, if the next step of evolution means I get to attend games with the sun on my back rather than having to wear 7 layers to keep the frost bite at bay then that makes perfect sense.

Conclusion

We’ll see a March-October domestic calendar sooner rather than later; and when it comes people will be grateful for it. Hopefully tragedy will not be the driving force of this change.