The ADNOC Professional Football League will resume its activities today, just 48 hours after the national team’s match with its Qatari counterpart in the Asian qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup, amid experts and analysts’ fear that quite a few of them will not appear in the eighth round, and their level will fluctuate due to the pressure of the matches. Which they suffered during their involvement in international matches.
Sports analyst Dr. Ahmed Al-Awadhi confirmed that the return of international players to resume their local activities after this short period of their international involvement may expose some of them to muscle injuries because they did not receive full recovery after the Qatar match yesterday.
He told “Emirates Today”: “The local calendar did not take into account the interactions of the national team and its players, as the league should have resumed its activity at least four to five days after the Qatar match, to avoid fatigue among the players and give them the opportunity to recover properly and avoid injuries.”
He added: “The problem may become more difficult for professional players in clubs who will return after playing matches outside the country, including hours of flight time. Therefore, clubs may find some difficulties in including their players in the eighth round, and this violates the principle of equal opportunities, because every person has the right to… A club that benefits from the services of all players, especially international players.”
For his part, football analyst Khaled Obaid said: “I think that players may be affected in terms of fatigue and exhaustion, if the pressure of matches is repeated by playing every two or three days for a period of five matches at most.”
He added: “The problem here is not the national team players, but the professional club players who were called up to their country’s national teams during the recent international agenda period, as they will inevitably be exposed to fatigue and it will be difficult for them to participate in matches, and that point should have been taken into account specifically.”
As for former international player Youssef Abdelaziz, he stressed that “club coaches will find it difficult to include their international players as key players in the eighth round, and in the best of cases they may be included in some periods of the matches, and this does not serve the competition or the clubs with the high pace of competition that it was.” In the past seven rounds.
He said: “Apart from the possibility of injuries that international players may be vulnerable to due to the pressure of matches, the same passion for playing local matches will decrease for them with the difficult periods and psychological pressures that they experienced over the past week due to their connection to the special entitlements in the World Cup qualifiers.”
He added: “I also imagine that the passion in the stands will decrease during the eighth round, as fans are saturated with watching the national team’s matches against Kyrgyzstan and Qatar, and I do not expect their attendance to be in the expected numbers in that round.”
In turn, Ajman Club doctor Tariq Sadiq stressed the players’ need for compulsory rest after any vigorous activity, whether in official or friendly matches, and even training, to restore their health readiness and avoid exposure to injuries.
He said: “48 hours are not enough between holding matches for the player to be medically ready and the possibility of some of them being exposed to injuries will be a possibility, albeit to varying degrees, and it would have been better to extend that period to at least four days so that the medical and technical staff in the clubs would have the opportunity.” To restore the recovery of its players.
He added: “Injuries may not only come from physical effort, but they may also come from mental exhaustion and pressure on the team’s players as a result of the conditions they lived through in the previous period before the Kyrgyzstan and Qatar matches, and the inevitability of winning them in order to preserve the Whites’ chances of reaching the World Cup finals. We must ignore this point specifically because it is one of the factors that may lead to injuries.”
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