Kylian Mbappé – UEFA – Handout / VSPress / SIPA
- As foreign championships resume, Ligue 1 thinks of next season
- Clubs will gradually return to training in June
- 20 Minutes draws up the probable calendar of the resumption of French football
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The Bundesliga: has resumed. La Liga: will resume on June 11.
The Premier League: returns on the 17th of the month. Serie A: starts three days later.
Ligue 1, it, lowered the curtain before everyone and, except last minute jolt (OL, Amiens and Toulouse have an appointment Thursday before the Council of State), will not reopen until August for the start of the 2020-21 season. Time for 20 minutes to outline the outline of the calendar for the resumption of French football.
Resumption of training looms for clubs
At the time of writing, to use a fashionable term, players are “in the wild”. Understand, on vacation. Most of them will resume in June, even if clubs like Monaco or Marseille await confirmation of August 23 as the starting point for the championship before counting on a return to training date, and others – Strasbourg and Rennes – briefly resumed in May before resuming leave (from 12 to 29 for Alsatians and from 13 to 29 for Bretons). For the global vision, it gives something like “that”.
Their recovery is fixed: OL (June 8), Nice and Nantes (June 15),
PSG, Montpellier, Bordeaux (June 22), Reims (June 23), Brest and Strasbourg (June 29) and Angers (July 1).
They do not yet know their date of recovery: OM (the club refers to the end of June), Losc, ASSE, Lens, Dijon, Lorient, Nîmes, Monaco, Metz and Rennes.
Friendly tests and tournaments, summer hits?
Regarding the recovery itself, a common denominator emerges: the teams should start with a coronavirus screening test followed by heart tests (primarily for players who are positive for Covid-19). This is the case for PSG according to information relayed by The Parisian but also FC Nantes, which we managed to zyeuter the recovery program which should result in an internship in Annecy in July. In Bordeaux, where the players have been individually following a distance program since June 1, a member of the staff warns of the exceptional content of the physical preparation to come.
“We will have to go very slowly at the start because what the players have just experienced has nothing to do with a classic off-season break. It is much more brutal. We will have to do real re-athletic work for two or three weeks. We are a little worried because we see for example in Germany a lot of hamstring injuries. “
The other major difficulty will lie in the organization of pre-season games. To compensate for the absence of foreign opponents, context requires, Jean-Michel Aulas offers to organize a friendly tournament in July whose protagonists would be OL, PSG, Saint-Etienne (all have at least a Cup final in a priori play in early August), as well as Losc, a volunteer to join the trio. The idea being to find the rhythm before plunging back into the European bath. For the rest of the preseason, the Lyonnais boss suggested that other meetings of the same type could take place with other teams.
The cup finals and an unknown named Trophée des champions
No date has been set for the Coupe de la Ligue, the Coupe de France or the Champions Trophy – if the latter is played – but Noël Le Graët has a plan for the first two finals. The boss of the 3F would like to hold them in seven days at the Stade de France. First the Coupe de la Ligue (PSG-OL) then the Coupe de France (PSG-ASSE), as he explained last week at The team. “If we can have matches in August, it would not be bad. […] First the League Cup, because Lyon could play in the Champions League on August 7 or 8, its return match against Juventus, even if it is not confirmed. It is therefore better that the Lyonnais play before. But we will therefore have to wait until mid-June to fix our dates for August. “
A final 4 or 8 for C1 in August?
One thing is certain before I get my hands in this interstellar sludge that is the end of the Champions League: the competition will not end in its classic format. There are 17 games to play in August, including round of 16 (OL concerned) and quarterfinals to be defined for which Paris is already qualified. UEFA will unveil the final format of this fatally discounted edition in two weeks. The Spanish sports daily As – which had hit the mark on the bike recovery schedule – believes it knows its contours.
Two scenarios: the first follows the track of a final four, preceded by a quarter-final in a match on neutral ground or by drawing lots to determine who will play at home. The second would tend towards a final 8 with knockout matches in a single city (probably Lisbon or Munich instead of Istanbul). An option feared by broadcasters who would see the number of posters melt considerably. But UEFA wants to finish it off as soon as possible to get some air before the group stage of the next edition, scheduled for 20 October. An entire program.
A conclusion to this story, however: if all the other European championships will have resumed for several weeks and the teams will be well prowled, Lyon and PSG will arrive to defend their luck in the fresh Champions League of almost five months without high matches level. No doubt for this reason that Lyon decided to start its preparation early (June 5). For PSG, which will resume two weeks later, we can worry, said Xavier Frezza, physical trainer responsible for twenty professional players in Ligue 1 and abroad. “On June 22, it seems short to be ready. After that, what will be best in early August in the Champions League? Missing matches because you leave prep like OL and PSG or arriving with two months of matches every three days because you finish the championship like the others? I’m curious to see what physical condition the Germans or Italians will be in August. “
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