The 2022 World Cup that will be held in Qatar and will start in a few days is one of a kind. As we know, it is the first in history to start in the winter and as a result, it is also the first in which the players who play on the grass played for their teams a few days before. This uniqueness allows us to check an intriguing statistic – which team has the players who played the most this season?
In our case, it’s better to look at the table from below and check which team has played the least this season. This team is – Qatar. All the players of Qatar’s squad played a total of 2,150 minutes this season, the fewest among the teams of the tournament, and the reason for this is simple: its players are not with their teams, but only play in preparatory games in the team’s training camp in the last year.
“It’s just too long, they need to shorten the training camp,” said an official in one of the Qatari League teams last July, “taking the players out of competitive games is difficult from the mental aspect. It’s hard to stay together for so long, players may wear out mentally.” We will see the results of this experiment of Taktar Chosen in a few days.
Let’s go back to our original question – which team has the most playing minutes in its squad? Well, with quite a few stars from different teams in Europe, the Portugal national team is at the top of the list with almost 31,000 minutes of playing time this season between all the players of the squad. In second place is Brazil, almost two thousand less minutes than Portugal and in third place is Germany, with just under 29,000 minutes.
The England and France national teams recorded quite the same amount of minutes, with England recording 28,014 minutes, only 66 minutes more than the French. The Argentina team and its many stars are also in a relatively high place, with 26,329 minutes, while the Spain team is in a relatively low place on the list, with 23,582 minutes, between the Japan team and the Uruguay team.
Listen to the new episode of the Football World Cup – Analysis of Houses 1 to 4
Listen to the special episode for the World Cup on Radio 5