Football's working time gap: Why social dialogue, not the courtroom, should write the rules for the post-2030 calendar

About the authors
David Diaz is a partner at Baker McKenzie, leading its Employment & Compensation practice in EMEA and Sports Law practice in Madrid. He advises clubs, players, agents and investors on football employment contracts, transfers, compensation and M&A transactions. Carlos Hurtado is a team leader in Baker McKenzie’s Employment & Compensation and Sports Law practices in Madrid. He advises players and clubs on contracts, transfers, image rights and compensation, and represents them before the FIFA Football Tribunal and Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

By David Diaz and Carlos Hurtado

Professional football is a high-risk industry by design. Physical contact, maximal sprints and repeated high-intensity efforts are the product itself, not a by-product of it. Injury is a constant presence. For the workers who are also the protagonists of the game, the workplace itself is the main hazard. The elite medical and peak performance teams that clubs have built in recent years are testimony to this. Yet in an industry that sends its workforce across competitions, time zones, remote work sites and even different teams altogether, from club to national team, the absence of standardised minimum safeguards and harmonised player protections to manage rest and recovery is striking. 

FIFPRO's Player Workload Monitoring reports show for a number of years that the calendar affects players far beyond the minutes they play. Every match also brings travel, hotel concentrations, meetings, recovery sessions and media duties. On top of this, clubs increasingly monitor players outside the training ground, including during their holidays. In congested periods with multiple games per week, which has become the norm rather than the exception, time-tracking by FIFPRO Player IQ records working weeks of 68 to 79+ hours for players whose clubs and national teams feature in multiple and sometimes simultaneous competitions.

Other high-risk industries, from aviation to road transport, measure fatigue and limit working time as a matter of course. In football, each competition organiser plans its own competition, and nobody measures the accumulated effects. From a legal perspective, the figures above are therefore not only a performance concern. They raise a question of compliance with occupational health and safety and working time law that football has largely avoided until now.

EU law is unambiguous on one point that football has yet to absorb: the protection of workers’ health and safety is a fundamental objective that cannot be subordinated to purely economic or organisational considerations, however commercially valuable the competition calendar may be.

No exemption for football

The starting point is clear. Under EU law, limits on working time are a health and safety measure and a fundamental right. Article 31 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees every worker a limit on maximum working hours, daily and weekly rest, and paid annual leave. The Working Time Directive (2003/88/EC) makes this concrete: 48 hours a week on average, 11 consecutive hours of rest every day, an uninterrupted weekly rest period, and at least four weeks of paid leave in which the worker can genuinely switch off.

Professional football is not exempt from these rules. It rather feels out of touch with constantly growing competition formats that no minimum safeguards for something as common sense as player rest and recovery has yet been defined and implemented as a universal standard. After all, the Court of Justice of the EU has repeatedly confirmed that sport, as an economic activity, is subject to EU law, most recently in Super League, Diarra and others. Footballers meet every criterion of an employee: they provide services, under the direction of their club, for pay. The Directive's exemptions for autonomous workers and emergency services do not apply. Players do not decide when they train, play or travel.

The ILO has reached the same conclusion from a global perspective. Its March 2026 guidelines for professional athletes describe rest and recovery as 'central to managing OHS risks'. They state that work time, including travel and public relations obligations, should be set through social dialogue. The European Parliament made the same point in its resolution of 7 October 2025 on the European Sport Model, which called for proactive management of occupational safety and health risks for athletes, “including factors such as travel, match calendars and overlapping competitions”.

The question of control

Working time law does not care how hard someone works. It asks whether the worker is free to use their own time. The Directive recognises only two categories, working time and rest, with nothing in between. The courts decide which applies by looking at how far the employer controls the worker, not at what the period is called. Applied to football, some activities are easy to classify: training, matches, tactical meetings, pre-match preparation and mandatory recovery are working time.

Travel to away matches, at times and on routes set by the club, is very likely to be working time under the Court's recent case law on travel. The team hotel time is subject to some nuances but when a player is subject to curfews, communal meals, restrictions on visitors and constant supervision, it is hard to describe the period as rest. As a general rule, such periods may qualify as working time, except where the player is genuinely free to use their time for personal activities or sleep, in which case such time could be regarded as rest time. 

This distinction matters a great deal. A multi-jurisdictional review of a five-week schedule from several leading European clubs found that, under EU standards, the 11-hour daily rest period was missed on at least eight occasions. In two of the five weeks, the player had no weekly rest at all. 

In practice, the answer is likely to turn less on the hotel itself than on the habits of the game. Football has developed a deeply ingrained culture of player control. A squad checking into a hotel the night before a home match may serve genuine team purposes, but it also places players under a degree of supervision that would rarely be accepted in other industries. That level of control points towards working time. It need not be a problem for the sport: the genuine needs of a team environment, such as collective preparation, travel logistics and recovery protocols, could quite easily be defined and justified in a football-specific framework. That would require the sector to look past the commercial and political dependencies that shape its calendar and competition decisions, and to agree on a set of minimum safeguards that are standard to any high-risk working environment. 

One player, one employer, two teams – club and country

The working time that matters for health is the total. A player's body does not distinguish between a domestic league match, a Champions League trip, a qualifier, national team tournament and pre-season tour yet the industry plans and records them separately. In the 2025/26 season, Achraf Hakimi spent 107 days, almost 30 percent of the season, with Morocco. Alexis Mac Allister spent 86 days across five Argentina camps, several of them involving return flights to South America. 

EU law looks at the whole. The Court of Justice has held that where a worker has several contracts with the same employer, the minimum daily rest applies to those contracts taken as a whole, not to each one separately (Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti, C-585/19). The reasoning is that the weaker party must not lose protection because of how the work is divided up, and it applies with equal force to football. Players are released to national associations under a regulatory system that binds the clubs themselves. Club and association are therefore in a position close to joint employment, with a shared duty to coordinate on prevention. 

Through release payments, injury compensation from FIFA and commercial joint ventures with competition organisers, clubs both profit from their players’ work beyond the club and hold real influence over the calendar, which emphasizes the responsibility of the primary employer for ensuring that a player returning from international duty receives the rest the law requires. The club is responsible even though it may only have limited control over the national team schedule directly. Currently, neither the employer nor the international governing body takes responsibility for the aggregate risk. This is the systemic gap in football's prevention chain.

The risk: a gap in the ECJ sports jurisprudence

Working time is one of the most developed areas of EU social law. Over three decades, the Court of Justice has defined working time and rest for hospital doctors on call, firefighters on stand-by at home, broadcasting technicians at remote sites, mobile technicians travelling between customers and train drivers. It has protected annual leave as a right to genuine rest, and it has required employers to keep an objective, reliable system for recording daily working time. Not one of these rulings has yet been applied to professional football.

The Court's sports case law has followed a different path. From Bosman to Super League, International Skating Union, Royal Antwerp, Diarra, Seraing and, most recently, ROGON, the Court has examined football through free movement, competition law and access to justice. It has repeatedly confirmed that football is an economic activity and that players are workers. It has not yet addressed the protection of those workers' health and safety in the employment relationship. This is a clear gap in the current jurisprudence, and health and safety is the most obvious area for the next case to fill it.

The real risk for the industry is not a case about hours as such. Any working time case built on health and safety would almost certainly have to deal with the accumulation of working time between club and national team. A court asked whether a player received his daily and weekly rest cannot ignore the international window or international tournaments he has just returned from. That would take the Court into the most sensitive territory in football governance: mandatory player release, and the balance between club and national team football. Under EU law, a key question would also be whether the national association could qualify as an ‘employer’ for the purposes of the Working Time Directive.

No part of the industry has an interest in testing that territory in court. A ruling on accumulated working time could unsettle the player release system, the balance between club and national team football and the commercial arrangements built around both, with consequences no single stakeholder could control. That shared exposure should bring clubs, leagues, national associations, competition organisers, governing bodies and players to the most obvious solution: agreeing common-sense safeguards themselves. Some are almost self-evident, starting with a protected off-season break in which players can genuinely disconnect, followed by a proper re-training period before competition resumes. EU law already provides the tool to build on them.

The opportunity: Article 17

EU working time law and the Directive provides a way out, and it is a constructive one. Articles 17 and 18 allow the two sides of industry to depart from the rules on daily rest, breaks, weekly rest, night work and reference periods. The condition is that workers receive equivalent compensatory rest or, in exceptional cases, appropriate protection. Football, where players regularly work in places far from one another, fits well within this framework. Annual leave is the exception: it cannot be derogated from.

Several sectors have already used this route. Road transport, seafaring, civil aviation, cross-border rail and inland waterways all have their own working time rules, most of them developed from agreements between the social partners.

Football could do the same. Players, clubs and leagues and international governing bodies would agree where the sport genuinely needs flexibility, for example after evening matches, on overnight returns or in double-match weeks.

In short, the football industry could codify its practices, justify its needs and define a common understanding of health and safety. In exchange, they would guarantee binding minimum safeguards: protected rest and recovery, a minimum number of weeks to re-train, a common practice to set competitions and work schedules, monitoring of combined club and national team workload, and an off-season in which players can disconnect completely.

Two platforms for the post-2030 calendar

The post-2030 men’s international match calendar is being negotiated now, and the formats feeding into it continue to grow. A 64-team FIFA World Cup is under discussion. The 2030 edition will open with centenary matches in South America before the main tournament moves to Spain, Portugal and Morocco. A further expansion of the FIFA Club World Cup is already being considered. As the calendar expands to serve new commercial windows and competitions, the economic value of each player’s working time is shared between clubs, national associations and competition organisers, and so, under any coherent reading of health and safety law, must be the responsibility for the risk it creates.

The industry has two forums in which to set these standards before they are imposed from outside. In Europe, the European Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee for professional football brings together players, clubs and leagues, and has already begun work on occupational health and safety definitions. It is the natural place to agree Article 17 derogations and the safeguards that go with them. These can be implemented through national collective agreements, or through a European agreement that the social partners ask the European Commission to turn into legislation. 

At global level, the new FIFA Global Social Dialogue Platform, agreed between social partners (FIFPRO, EFC and WLA) in 2026, gives the industry its first structure for agreeing standards that cover all players, on rest, off-season breaks, recovery windows and minimum time between matches, and for building them into calendars beyond 2030 in close alignment with the European Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee.

Together, the two platforms can deliver what football has never had: common safety standards, a shared methodology to monitor player load across club and national team, and derogations that are fit for purpose. The tools already exist. They include a digital working time record that follows the player across club and national team, fatigue and rest risk assessments for congested periods, and a coordination protocol between clubs and national associations.

The legal position is clear enough that football no longer needs to debate whether working time rules apply. The real choice is who designs the rules. If player unions, employers and governing bodies agree them together, football will get standards that fit the sport and protect the people who play it. If the industry waits, the first answer may come from Luxembourg, in a case on combined club and national team working time that football does not control.