Spanish league president Javier Tebas rejected Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois’ plea to postpone the team’s 2025-26 opener to give players time to rest following the expanded Club World Cup.<\/p>\n
Real Madrid was eliminated with a 4-0 semifinal loss to Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday and will have a 41-day offseason before their La Liga opener against Osasuna on Aug. 19.<\/p>\n
Tebas said the decision not to move the opener was made by the Spanish Football Federation and La Liga agreed with it. He said players were to have 21 days off and 21 days of preseason training.<\/p>\n
“I believe that they will have 20 days to rest instead of 21 and no other leagues like the Premier League for Chelsea or the French Ligue 1 for PSG are changing the games,” he said through a translator during a Friday interview with The Associated Press. “So I don\u2019t believe that we should change the calendar for that reason, especially thinking that it\u2019s a matter of one day.”<\/p>\n
Real Madrid played 68 competitive matches in a season that started Aug. 18: 38 in the league, 14 in the Champions League, six each in the Copa del Rey and the Club World Cup, two in the Spanish Super Cup and one apiece in the European Super Cup and Intercontinental Cup.<\/p>\n
PSG will play its 65th game in Sunday’s Club World Cup final and Chelsea its 64th. PSG opens its season from Aug. 15-17 at Nantes and Chelsea starts against Crystal Palace on Aug. 17.<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s always the same for La Liga,” Courtois said Wednesday. “To listen those comments from a president it\u2019s something that I haven\u2019t seen it in Italy, or in England, nor the NBA and NFL. It\u2019s fine if Tebas doesn\u2019t like the Club World Cup, but it exists. It\u2019s part of the FIFA calendar. We\u2019re here competing, and it seems this gentleman just wants to be the focus. I\u2019ve never seen a president of another competition speak like that. The players’ health is on the line.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spanish league president Javier Tebas rejected Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois’ plea to postpone the team’s 2025-26 opener to give players time to rest following the expanded Club World Cup. Real Madrid was eliminated with a 4-0 semifinal loss to Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday and will have a 41-day offseason before their La Liga opener …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51321"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51326,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51321\/revisions\/51326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}