Football in August

It's August, the mercury finally cracked 30C for the first time this year on Sunday, and England have won the Ashes against a limited but bloody stubborn Australia. Oh, and the football season started fifteen days ago.

Fifteen days ago - the second weekend in August. Now I love football a hell of a lot, definitely up there with my other top sports both to watch and to play, but surely, surely, the second week of August is far too early? Britain's footballers only had nine weeks off between the FA Cup Final and the start of the season. For professional athletes, exhausted after a fifty game season, that's simply ridiculous.

We're told that the reason the season started too early is because it's a World Cup year, so everything has to be finished nice and early to give our boys the best chance possible. But just think about that for a moment - we're forcing the cream of our crop to take less of a summer break, cram even more matches into a shorter season and then play for up to another five weeks to hopefully lift the Jules Rimme at the end of it all.

Simply put, there is too much football to fit into a season anymore. It's not even as if the August football provides particular value for money either - players look tired, unfit and overweight whilst the Premier League is disrupted by all manner of internationals and European qualifying games. Meanwhile the FA Cup and League Cup have already started in earnest for the lower teams. And all this despite the aforementioned mercury hitting 30C.

I'd love to say at this point that there's a simple solution - which would surely be to reduce the number of teams in each league. But the problem is that football won't do it because no other sport will either.

Cricket is about to embark on a mammoth series of one day internationals following eight intense weeks of test action, the rugby union season continues to stretch as European competitions grow, formula one now has seventeen or eighteen rounds compared to twelve only a few years back and rugby league got so fed up with it all that they switched to a summer league (which seems to extend far beyond the actual summer). And to cap it all, tennis now seems to be played every single month of the year, forcing the world's best to slog it out across twelve continuous rolling months to protect their rankings.

It's got to stop - too much of a good thing very quickly becomes boring and repetitive. As a prime example, witness the continued overhyping of 'Super Sunday' by Sky Sports (the fact that the fixtures seem to keep coming together so fortuitously is another matter entirely) or the fact that a game labelled Liverpool vs Barcelona or Chelsea vs AC Milan just doesn't seem to appeal quite so much anymore. We've seen their players lots of times before, they're no longer shrouded in mystery and intrigue, and we'll probably see them again next year even if we miss it this time.

Competitive sport is a marvellous, wonderful invention, but the continued year round thirst for exposure by individual sports is drastically overcrowding the calendar and reducing the magic of it all.

Satellite television hasn't helped, but if we want the majesty of sporting competition restored then we have to resist the urge and remember the old adage - less (truly) is more.