Regarding bigger squad size for CWC, we can do something in the January market aswell if it feels we are too thin for the rest of the year.
Contract thing is an interesting detail. Arnautovic contract is ending in that summer and I don't know what will happen then. What a fucked up idea from the beginning. No one has thought of this before?
My best guess is that it's going to be a similar deal to what happened in 2020 with COVID and the schedules then...most leagues didn't finish until after June ended, and there was the European competitions played in August. There was concern about "what about July 1 free agents?", and that ended up being a non-concern, players who were otherwise out of contract still finished their competitions and then whatever happened later was its own deal. Odds are, if a player is out of contract and set to leave, they'll either sign a short contract to see out the remainder of the CWC (if their team is still alive in the competition) or the end of contract doesn't become valid until the season itself - assuming the CWC is officially part of the 2024-'25 European season - has completed.
The bigger problems, no doubt, are created by potentially having a super short off-season and the effect that will have on the transfer window for teams involved, how they transact business. For arguments sake, we reach the CWC final on July 13, just how much of an off-season are we going to have before 2025-'26 begins? When does pre-season training begin? In the COVID year obviously every team had the same break - it was as if the summer break was shifted from June-August to March-May, the break between the end of 2019-'20 and 2020-'21 was extremely brief, especially for CL and EL teams - but that's not the case here. We're going to have a few weeks between the end of Serie A and the CWC (maybe with a CL Final appearance mixed in
), then potentially a month of the CWC, then the Serie A season will likely begin around the third weekend of August as it normally does (and since summer 2026 is a World Cup year it's not like there's a lot of flexibility here). Poor motherfuckers are barely gonna be able to get away from the sport.
We're all football fans obviously and we all enjoy watching the games, but fuck me we need fewer games in this sport, not more. Just writing this all out annoys me. This sport already has such a short off-season as it is between club seasons, and now almost every summer is tied up in
something; Euros + Copa America's, or the World Cup, or the CWC...it's ridiculous. I'm also guessing the fucking Nations League shit fits in there somewhere (another useless fucking money-grab competition). Quit running these guys into the ground.