The hell of the international break

Make it stop

When I was young, an England international match was a big deal. International football was a big deal. We didn’t know anything about players from other countries. We didn’t see them on television. We only saw them in the World Cup, or - less frequently - in the European championships, which until 1976 started at the semi-final stage, and expanded to eight teams for the 1980 tournament. People of my age still remember the shock of seeing Brazil’s 1970 team. They were clearly the world’s best, we’d never heard of hardly any of them, and they could do things we had never seen before.

The vast majority of players earned their living in their own countries. Pele, the best player of his generation, played for Santos in Brazil until he was 35, when he went to the US. Bobby Charlton, the greatest England player of his generation, played for Manchester United until he was 37, when he went to Preston for a season. Charlton played Pele three times, all in World Cups. By contrast, the two greatest players of the modern era, Lionel Messi and Christiano Ronaldo, have played each other 36 times to date. (I use the present perfect tense rather than the past tense because there is still a chance that Ronaldo’s Saudi team will play Messi’s US team in some bullshit tournament in China or somewhere.) Yes, they both played in Spain’s La Liga, which accounts for the majority of those matches, but neither of them is Spanish. And the first time they faced off in a club game, Ronaldo was in Manchester; for the last, he was in Italy.