Less than 12 hours after Ellie Carpenter walked off the grass in the Spanish city of Bilbao after losing the UEFA Women’s Champions League final to Barcelona, the Olympique Lyonnais defender was on a flight back home to Australia to link up with the Matildas in Adelaide.
After arriving late on Tuesday night, she had just three days to recover from post-game soreness and jet lag before making a substitute appearance for Australia in their 1-1 draw with China. Three days after that, she played 87 minutes in the team’s 2-0 win in Sydney.
This has been life for Carpenter, and for many of her Matildas team-mates, during the past few years: a blur of airports and stadiums and hotels, with very little time for much else in between.
Increasingly, this jam-packed schedule is becoming the new normal for professional women footballers as the game around them rapidly grows and the time in which they have to take a break from it rapidly shrinks.
Carpenter’s only serious rest period since the start of this year will come during the next three weeks, where she will return to Europe for a holiday, before entering into yet another Matildas camp on July 4 as the team prepares for the Olympics.
“It’s tough, the calendar is tough,” Carpenter said after the first China game.
“It’s getting tougher every year. We’ve expressed these problems to FIFPro recently, but we’re all coming back off seasons: a lot of the girls were playing in four competitions this season, a game every three days. We’re just quite tired.
“We travel so much during the season [and] it catches up with you eventually. Our mind knows that our season is over, so our body kind of automatically relaxes … subconsciously. That’s also hard, then, to come and play these last two games at the back end of the season.
“When we come out, we want to play our best football, you want to give 100 per cent. And I know every single one of us, we want to give 100 per cent. Some days, that might not be able to physically happen; mentally we can’t do that, but we always try our best.
“We’re professionals at this now, but the schedule is jammed. It’s not OK.”
What is the international calendar?
FIFA’s international match calendar is the global schedule within which all football, from the domestic to international level, is played.
The global governing body’s calendar, which they usually design to cover four years at a time, dictates the shape of major competitions like World Cups and Olympic Games, all the way down to confederation tournaments and domestic league seasons. It is the timetable that the whole game must adhere to.
The calendar has become front-of-mind for many in women’s football in recent years: with more clubs and competitions being introduced around the world, and only 365 days in which to squeeze them all, the result is that the game’s top-level players — who often play the most football for club and for country — are playing more and more with fewer and fewer chances to rest and recover in between.
For example, Matildas captain Steph Catley was given just three weeks’ break after the end of last year’s World Cup and the start of Champions League qualifiers with Arsenal back in Europe, which then swung back into her domestic league season.
That gruelling schedule hasn’t let up: she was also one of three Matildas (along with Caitlin Foord and Kyra Cooney-Cross) who travelled with Arsenal to Melbourne last month for the A-League All Stars event, which kicked off less than a week after their league season had ended, followed by the two China games a week later.
Further, if the Matildas make it to the gold medal match of the Olympics on August 11, these three players will have just a week to rest before Arsenal’s pre-season tour of the USA begins on August 18.
This lack of rest, in addition to increased travel times and distances, the under-resourcing of teams with qualified and experienced staff, and the increasing physical demands of top-flight football, has been connected with the epidemic of major injuries, including ACL tears, that have swept throughout the women’s game over the past two years.
As such, the calendar has become more regularly criticised by players, coaches, and unions in ignoring the welfare and wishes of footballers in favour of competition and league organisers who want to add more games to the calendar in order to make more money.
And it’s getting to breaking-point.
Last month, global players’ union FIFPro said that players could consider strike action against FIFA over their refusal to listen to their growing concerns, with the union’s Europe president saying the current congested schedule was “an emergency” and that was putting the game and its players, particularly on the men’s side, “in danger”.
The Matildas are part of this growing call for players to be more seriously considered in FIFA’s international match calendar, with a report released this week by the Australian players’ union, Professional Footballers Australia (PFA), showing that FIFA’s scheduling remains a major concern for national team players, who desire a stronger voice in the room where these decisions are being made.
So what are FIFA doing about it?
Last month, FIFA released its new four-year calendar for women’s football that’s set to begin in 2026 and finish at the end of 2029, with a few key differences from the previous version.
First, the number of international windows has been reduced from six to five, with the old September window removed altogether, meaning players will not have to travel as regularly as the last calendar required.
International games will now take place in February-March, April, May-June, October, and November-December, with one or two “blocked periods” (where key competitions must take place) floating around early and mid-year.
There will be a minimum of four weeks in between each window, while there will be at least 10 weeks between a major global tournament like a World Cup and the following window.
Second, FIFA has reduced the ‘types’ of windows from three down to two. There will now be two Type I windows, which are nine days long and have up to two matches included for national teams, while there will be three Type II windows, which are 12 days long and permit up to three matches to be played.
This means that the length of most international windows players take part in will be longer, which FIFA says will allow for more travel and rest time for players, while it will also provide more opportunities for more national team games to be played on weekends, which they hope will provide a boost to attendances and broadcast opportunities.
Finally, all ‘types’ of windows will be aligned across confederations, streamlining the organisation of international friendlies and competitions, with every nation having the same block of time in which to participate in matches, rather than each confederation doing different things at the same time.
This new calendar, according to FIFA, will be particularly beneficial for players and teams from areas of the world that are less professional, with national team games providing more opportunities to not only play, but to be paid to play, too.
“This calendar is such a critical tool to ensure we continue to drive global professionalisation of women’s football,” FIFA’s Chief Women’s Football Officer Sarah Bareman said.
“In many parts of the world, international football provides crucial top-flight playing opportunities for female players, and this is particularly the case in nations where domestic leagues are not yet fully professional.
“This calendar strikes a balance to enable the domestic and international games to grow side by side, while at the same time ensuring players will have more opportunities to rest, recover, and re-train between windows and following major tournaments.”
Cool, so what’s the issue?
Well, while FIFA’s new calendar has improved on the old model, some believe it still does not go far enough to protect players and provide opportunities for women’s football — especially at the domestic league level — to grow.
FIFPro, for example, had requested that FIFA build into the new calendar mandatory rest periods, guaranteeing that players had a minimum number of days each calendar year to mentally and physically recover from their gruelling schedules.
They had reportedly asked FIFA for two blocked-out rest periods, one consisting of 28 days and one of 14 days, ensuring that players were provided with this mandated opportunity to rest outside the commercially-driven interests of their associations or confederations.
However, no mandatory rest periods were included in FIFA’s final version, with the decisions instead left up to national teams and clubs to manage player loads.
The problem with delegating responsibility to these other footballing organisations is that, as revenue-driven bodies, more of them naturally want more slices of a limited pie.
Confederations are adding more competitions to the calendar every year, while FIFA themselves will also be introducing a Women’s Club World Cup from 2026 (which will sit right in the middle of the A-League Women season), stuffing an already-tight schedule with even more games.
Leaving clubs and national teams to deliberate amongst themselves about when and where to schedule games is how the women’s game reached this critical point in the first place, with administrators playing tug-of-war with the players ultimately caught in the middle.
Second, the particular logistical decisions made by FIFA in the construction of their new windows means that domestic leagues — which has become the primary driver of women’s football’s growth — will potentially find it even more difficult to accelerate in their development.
As former Matilda and FIFA executive committee member Moya Dodd wrote earlier this week: “The main income sources [for women’s leagues] — media rights, commercial sponsorships and partnerships, ticketing, hospitality and concessions — all hinge upon match days.
“A regular competition calendar with a sellable number of matches is crucial to the financial success of clubs and leagues.”
But FIFA’s calendar impacts the ability for leagues to maximise these income sources, with fewer weekends now available for leagues to schedule games and attract broadcast interest.
More league games may be forced to be played in the middle of weeks, with all the associated questions around stadium availability, the desire of fans to travel, as well as the appetite of sponsors and broadcasters to invest in a product that may not be as maximally visible or well-attended as it could be.
“It’s hard to see how the leagues can maintain rhythm and momentum in these conditions,” Dodd writes. “For women’s football to thrive, the professional leagues must be able to prosper.
“Without a commercially sustainable competition format, league revenues will be stifled, investor confidence chilled and professionalism relegated to the slow lane.”
Finally, even though FIFA claimed that its calendar was backed by “extensive research, analysis, and consultation, with the impact on players at the heart of its design,” multiple stakeholders have argued otherwise.
For example, the Women’s Leagues Forum, a new body that represents most of the world’s domestic competitions, had twice requested a consultation with FIFA on the calendar but was rebuffed both times.
Chaired by NWSL commissioner Jessica Bareman, the WLF sent a letter to the governing body ahead of the calendar’s announcement criticising some of its key elements, including the lengthened Type II windows and overlap with weekends.
“This recommendation would create a range of detrimental issues for national leagues including, to name a few, less weekends to play matches, more matches forced to mid-week, limited stadium availability, broadcast partner dissatisfaction, and federation/confederation & tournaments/champions-league clashes,” the letter said.
“Furthermore, the health of elite/top-end players is put at risk with this calendar given the heavy load of matches they will need to play, particularly in light of increasing player injuries.”
FIFA claim their new calendar is “player-centric” and designed with the welfare of women footballers at its core.
However, the lack of mandatory rest periods, the lack of accommodation for flourishing women’s leagues, and the minimal consultation with bodies representing and advocating for players’ holistic football experience across club and country suggests FIFA still have some way to go to truly protect the players and grow the women’s game around the world.
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