Another day, another manager campaigning for an English winter break. Sir Alex Ferguson is one of a growing group who believe that having a couple of weeks off around Christmas time will have a direct benefit on the England team, and that the reason that we did badly in the World Cup is because our players play too much continuous domestic football between August and May.

So, youth teams packed with European imports is not the problem. A lack of qualified English coaches working with kids at grass roots is not the problem. The fact that so many coaches would rather take a cheap foreign import than risk a plucky English youth team graduate is not the problem. No, it’s clearly too much Premier League football.

This coming season, Premier League teams will be playing 5 games in the 20 days between the 18th of December and the 7th of January. That doesn’t sound like too many to me, but if the break did come in these games will still need to be played. So presumably they would have to be arranged on weekdays before or after December, which simply means fixture congestion at different times. The only way a break would make a difference is if the number of games played was lessened and the Premier League was reduced to 18 teams, which I think is a terrible idea.

Here’s a thought Sir Alex, why don’t you look at fixture congestion elsewhere, why not suggest that the Champions League alter the structure of their competition? The group stages and the two legged knock-out games mean that to get to the final Man Utd would need to play an extra 13 fixtures in a season. Of course, the revenue associated with the Champions League means that he wouldn’t question the logic of that, but its fine for the Premier League to alter for him, I mean, sorry, the England team.

The tradition of the Boxing Day and New Year fixtures is something that I and I’m sure many others enjoy and would be reluctant to lose. There are many other things that have contributed to our poor World Cup showing, so lets sort those out first before we start tampering with our domestic league structure.

Written By Karl Sears

Click on image to see a gallery of the BEST BABES at the World Cup this summer