It's a farce. Although it's never really acknowledged, even a normal World Cup takes club football about a year from which to recover, because the top players return shattered, some carrying niggling injuries, and (as some have acknowledged) feel jaded for most of the subsequent season. Holding an event in the middle of a season will cause ripples like throwing a boulder in a pond. I suspect the second half of that season will be strikingly flat, players won't get a proper rest in the summer, maybe the lucrative pre-season tours will have to be either scrapped or downgraded because of the absence of any stars, and the fatigue and ennui will drag on into the following year. Then on top of that the next wave of European Championship fixtures will also be even more unwelcome than usual. So it's not just a month of inconvenience, it's full of unintended consequences. The level of stupidity and incompetence at FIFA keeps rising like an explosion at a Pillsbury Dough factory.
