Jurgen Klopp has opened up on the intense strain placed on his Liverpool squad and other elite-level footballers as the Reds prepare to face Arsenal in the FA Cup on Sunday.
The Merseysiders will make a short trip to the Emirates Stadium for the third-round clash, before hosting Fulham in the first leg of the Carabao Cup semi-finals on Wednesday.
Liverpool won’t be action until Sunday 21 January, due to the Premier League’s winter break, when they make the trip to AFC Bournemouth.
However, if they draw with Mikel Arteta’s side, a replay will need to take place at Anfield to decide who progress to the fourth round with such a tie falling during the winter break.
“We can’t plan (for the winter break),” Jurgen Klopp told reporters ahead of the FA Cup third round. “I don’t know if I’m ready to be the voice for that again.
“Coincidentally I read what Sean (Dyche) said about it – that it just favours the bigger clubs – but I think the facts are on the table.
“He said that it would be cool if we could take some games out of a really busy December and put them into January. That might not be a bad idea, but it would then kill the winter break. I don’t know if that has to be the case.
“But there’s so much tradition in this competition. If I now, as a German, stood here and said anything about the FA Cup, everybody goes on (about it). I love the FA Cup.
“It’s just so difficult to stay on your feet and get through these rounds. You need a top squad to get to the end. And while you get there, you have to play other games.
“You play in the middle of something, you then play, if you go through, the final of the Carabao Cup, and that takes a league game out. It puts the league game somewhere in where it will definitely not fit in. It’s just the first space available and then boom, you play there. It’s unbelievably tricky.
“But we are obviously not in charge of this because if we (football people) would be in charge, it would look completely different. If the football people were in charge, and not because we are lazy, not at all, but because we are the people who really understand the intensity of what the boys are doing.”
Jurgen Klopp continued: “The outside world discusses it and say, ‘I work eight hour a day, seven days a week’ – and that’s 100 percent true. It’s just that they don’t run, sprint, tackle, sprint. It’s just different.
“If we could compare that then we would compare it. But we are not dumb. It’s just a different intensity and it is really difficult for the human body, as we know it, to deal with.
“While we are talking, probably UEFA and FIFA invents a new tournament and puts it in somewhere and suddenly getting a winter break in January is our smallest problem. The least of our problems.
“When is the new Club World Cup? Is it 2025? In the summer? I don’t know how to compare that to anything else, where you take time off your best employees and then just think, ‘After that they will go again and play a full season.’” But again, talking here I have again said too much…
“The people who decide about it don’t care about that. I am 100% sure there isn’t one guy deciding who can remember what it was like when he was a player – if he ever was a player.
“That’s how it is. I won’t be in there deciding and I won’t have the power for that. At some point in the future, someone will have to press the brake.”
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