Maresca agrees with Haaland that players started season jaded
City Manager Backs Haaland’s Fatigue Warning Ahead of Porto Clash
Bharatmorningnews.com – Manchester City’s head coach Enzo Maresca publicly aligned himself with striker Erling Haaland’s candid assessment that the modern football calendar leaves players entering the competitive season mentally drained and physically under-prepared. Speaking on Monday at Porto’s Dragao Stadium, the Italian manager acknowledged that finding match sharpness in the opening weeks of the campaign “was not easy” for squad members who had just returned from international duty, including the extended World Cup cycle.
The comments came hours before City’s Champions League group-stage opener against Porto on Tuesday, a fixture that places immediate demands on a squad still digesting the physical and psychological toll of a summer that stretched far beyond the traditional pre-season window.
Haaland’s YouTube Confession
The trigger for Maresca’s remarks was a video posted earlier that day on Haaland’s personal YouTube channel, in which the Norwegian forward laid bare the absence of any meaningful preparatory period before competitive football resumed.
“The new season started and I didn’t even have a pre-season. I normally have a bit of pre-season but this time, just nothing,” Haaland stated.
The striker, who has already netted three goals across three Premier League appearances this term, explained that his body would eventually respond to match fitness, provided he remained free of injury. Yet he stressed that the mental dimension of readiness proved far harder to rebuild after a compressed break.
“The physical side will come, if you manage to stay injury free, but you need to be sharp mentally as well, and that’s not easy,” he continued.
Haaland went on to describe the absence of that familiar pre-competitive hunger — the eagerness that typically fuels a player’s return after a summer of rest — as a direct consequence of a calendar that offers virtually no gap between one season and the next.
“We need to have that eager feeling to go back but we don’t because there is no time to properly stay away from football because there are so many games and the season is longer.”
He was careful to frame his observations not as grievance but as observation. Playing football year-round and earning a living from the sport, he noted, remained a privilege worth preserving even when the fatigue is palpable.
“I’m not complaining because it’s still a positive thing that you get to play football throughout the whole year and live off it.”
The World Cup Factor
Haaland’s situation is emblematic of a wider problem facing elite clubs in the post-World Cup era. Norway’s progression to the tournament’s quarterfinals meant the striker missed every warm-up fixture that City scheduled in the weeks before league play commenced. While his goal tally in the three matches he has featured in since returning has been prolific, the lack of a gradual reintroduction into competitive intensity left both player and coaching staff navigating unfamiliar territory.
Maresca, who inherited the City dugout mid-season last year and has since guided the club through a demanding European campaign, framed the issue not as an individual complaint but as a structural reality affecting the majority of his squad.
“It’s not easy for them it’s not easy for Erling, it’s not easy for most of the players that they continue to play for their international team,” the coach said.
Managing the Calendar, One Match at a Time
Rather than promising blanket rest periods or wholesale squad rotation, Maresca outlined a pragmatic, day-by-day approach to workload management. Depending on where the club sits in the season’s rhythm, a player might be rested for a single fixture or granted a full week away from first-team duties.
“It’s correct to give them some rest that can be one game out or can be one week away depends a little bit in which moment we are.”
The manager also cautioned against projecting long-term expectations onto the present. With the calendar stretching through February, March, and April, attempting to forecast where the squad will stand months ahead, he argued, only adds unnecessary pressure to an already complex scheduling equation.
“To be focused on the day by day makes it very complicated to think where we can be in February, March, April in terms of expectation.”
A Broader Calendar Debate
The exchange between Maresca and Haaland lands squarely in the middle of an ongoing industry conversation about fixture density. The expansion of European competitions, the addition of continental tournaments, and the biennial World Cup have collectively compressed the traditional off-season to a matter of weeks — or, for players on extended international runs, effectively eliminated it. Clubs now face the challenge of integrating returning internationals into a squad that must perform immediately, without the buffer of a conventional pre-season build-up.
For City, whose ambitions span the Premier League, Champions League, and domestic cups, the calculus is particularly acute. A squad that cannot rotate adequately risks accumulating fatigue precisely when the calendar demands peak performance. Maresca’s insistence on short-term focus, paired with Haaland’s transparent account of his own physical and mental state, underscores that the issue is neither trivial nor easily resolved by tactical substitution alone. It is, as both men acknowledged, a problem embedded in the architecture of the modern football season itself.
Tuesday’s trip to Porto will offer an early test of how well City’s squad has absorbed the compressed preparation period. Whatever the result, the underlying question — how to protect player welfare within an ever-lengthening calendar — will persist well beyond the Dragao Stadium and into the heart of every subsequent matchday.
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