Dear International Break,

We need to talk. Again. Because you keep showing up, uninvited, like a distant relative at Christmas who brings nothing but disruption and a vague sense of dread.

I had plans this weekend. Good plans. Plans that involved watching actual football. Competitive, meaningful, stakes-on-the-line football. Instead, I get to watch a friendly between two nations who will spend 90 minutes passing sideways before drawing 0-0 in front of 11,000 people in a stadium built for 60,000.

Do you know what happens during an international break? Nothing. Nothing happens. The league stops. The chat stops. Fantasy football freezes. The only content available is a press conference where a national team manager says "we respect the opposition" about a team they will beat 4-0 while playing their reserve goalkeeper.

And the injuries. Oh, the injuries. Every international break, without fail, a key player pulls a hamstring in a match that means absolutely nothing. A dead rubber qualifier. A Nations League group stage game. A fixture so meaningless that even the commentator sounds like he'd rather be somewhere else. And yet, somehow, your best centre-back is now out for six weeks because he was asked to play 90 minutes on a pitch that looked like a ploughed field.

I managed for 20 years, and every international break was the same routine. You send players away fit. They come back injured, jet-lagged, and having learned a new tactical system that contradicts everything you've been working on since pre-season. You spend Monday undoing the damage. By Wednesday, you're back to square one. By Saturday, you're hoping muscle memory kicks in before the opposition scores.

The worst part? There are too many of you. September, October, November, March, June. Five international breaks in a single season. Five. That is five times the rhythm of the league gets interrupted so that nations can play matches that qualify them for tournaments that have too many teams in them anyway.

Here is my proposal: one international break per season. In January. When the weather is miserable and nobody wants to watch club football anyway. You get your window. We get our sanity. Everyone wins.

Actually, you don't win. You never win anything meaningful. That's the whole point.

Yours in exhausted frustration,

Gaffer Gary
Retired manager. Full-time complainer. Part-time international break survivor.