No matter whether Zhou Yi's vacation is "hard" or comfortable, his "winter vacation" will not be too long. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

On January 3rd, Borussia Dortmund will begin their winter break.

This means that after spending New Year's Day at home on January 1, Zhou Yi will have to leave China on the 2nd and return to Germany to refocus on heavy training.

And he returned home on the 26th of December...... So he didn't even spend a week at home.

However, Zhou Yi should still be lucky, if he plays in the Premier League, then he will not even have a day to go home, and he can only go home during the summer holidays every year.

Because there is no winter break in the Premier League.

The winter break is not an uncommon thing in European football, and basically every league has a winter break of varying duration, with the exception of the Premier League, which does not exist at all.

Generally speaking, the Europa League is now divided into two categories, one is the one that finishes the entire schedule in a calendar year, as is the case in China, such as Iceland, Sweden and Norway and other Nordic countries. The other type is the New Year's Eve season, where a season is divided into two years.

The Nordic countries scheduled the league to be played in one year because they had a long, cold winter of almost half a year, which was not suitable for outdoor sports. Although other countries do not have such a perverted winter as Northern Europe, they will still encounter winter and be affected by the cold winter climate during New Year's Eve. In order to avoid or minimize this effect, it makes sense to set up a winter break.

The timing of the winter break varies from country to country, and even from year to year, and is fine-tuned according to the schedule and weather conditions. Generally speaking, the warmer the south of the country, the shorter the league winter break, for example, Spain only has a fourteen-day winter break, and Serie A also has fourteen days. France is a bit farther north than Italy and Spain, so their winter break is three weeks, twenty-one days. What about the Bundesliga? This season, the Bundesliga has a winter break of 33 days, more than a month.

Sounds like a long time, doesn't it?

But it's not the longest, the country with the longest winter break in Europe should be Russia, followed by Ukraine. It is surprising that the national league in such a cold region of Russia is also a cross-year, and their winter break can be close to 90 days, while Ukraine simply has a winter break of more than 90 days.

In the history of the Bundesliga, the winter break this season is far from the longest, not even long. The longest Bundesliga winter break is seventy-seven days, two and a half months!

When it comes to the winter break, it is actually a very controversial topic, some people agree with it, some people support it. In Germany, there is also a debate about the length of the winter break, and Beckenbauer has repeatedly said: "Among the five major European leagues, Germany has the largest population and the smallest team, and there is such a luxurious winter break." I don't think there's any need to interrupt the players. ”

Beckenbauer has always been a staunch supporter of a curtailment of the winter break, but the football emperor has made an even more exaggerated proposal than a shortened winter break – to scrap the summer holiday altogether and follow the example of the Nordic countries and allow the German season to be held in a calendar year, starting in March and lasting until December. Beckenbauer was the head coach of the German national team at the time of the proposal, and his proposal was naturally in the interests of the German national team, citing the fact that "major international competitions usually take place in the summer, and this approach allows the players to maintain a high level of fitness in international competitions, because it is the middle of the season." ”

At the time, such a suggestion was even endorsed by many Bundesliga coaches.

But fortunately, the German Football Association did not listen to Beckenbauer's words, otherwise for more and more German teams in Europe, Beckenbauer's original proposal was simply a troublemaker - the knockout rounds of European competitions generally start in mid-to-late February, and the Bundesliga teams at that time may have just started pre-season training, and the European competition will tear apart the pre-season training plans of Bundesliga teams, so that the teams participating in European competitions cannot prepare for the new season, thus affecting their performance throughout the season.

Those who oppose the winter break have their reasons and considerations, and those who support the winter break also have their considerations and reasons.

The main reason is to provide enough rest time for the team in the cold.

In fact, in the beginning, there was no such thing as a winter break in the Bundesliga, when football matches would only be suspended during the holidays, whether it was December or January, football matches were carried out as usual, similar to today's Premier League.

For example, on January 1, 1928, Bayern Munich played a crucial match against Eintracht Frankfurt. On 3 January 1954, the two teams played an important match in Offenbach in the Southern State League – a major match for West Germany at the time, no less important than the Bundesliga today – and on 2 January 1966, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund played an important cup match.

It wasn't until the winter of 1969 that things began to turn. The following year, in 1970, the World Cup in Mexico began very early, on May 31. So in late June 1969, the German Football Association (DFB) published its schedule, which only included the first half of the league. "If the national team qualifies for the World Cup in Mexico, the league can only end at the beginning of May, otherwise the end date is May 30. That's what the announcement says.

West Germany then qualified for the World Cup finals by beating Scotland, and the German Football Association announced the second half of the schedule in early November 1969. The second half of the season began on 10 January 1970, with the quarter-finals of the German Cup scheduled for late March, the semi-finals on 8 April and the final on 12 or 16 May.

In this way, after the last German Cup final, the German national team has half a month to prepare for the World Cup.

The plan is good, but the plan is not as good as the change, and the purpose of the best plan is to be changed.

That winter, central Europe was hit by a particularly cold winter of hunger. On New Year's Eve, the temperature in Berlin dropped to minus 17 degrees Celsius, and six days later, the city was covered with 31 centimeters of snow. At 10 o'clock on Thursday evening, January 8, the German Football Association's staff member in charge of scheduling, Walter Barezel, finally decided to cancel the first round of the second half of the match. A week later, he announced that he had cancelled six more fights.

"The worst thing is that we have to finish the season by May 2. For the sake of the World Cup, we cannot delay. What now? The real winter has just begun......

His words proved to be prescient, as intermittent snowfall in Berlin continued into mid-March, with 37 Bundesliga games cancelled in January alone.

Multiple adjustments to the schedule have led to some rather strange arrangements. Over the course of nine days in mid-April, the Reds and Whites Essen will play four league games on their home turf. The league ended on time that year because the German competition was completely disrupted - the 1969-1970 German Cup final was played after the start of the 1970-1971 season, and the eventual winner was the Offenbach Kickers, who were still theoretically in the second division by 29 August 1970.

Sounds messy, right?

This speaks volumes about how chaotic football organization used to be.

After such a chaotic season, many people have realized the importance of a long winter break, but that didn't change at the time, and the prevailing opinion at the time was this: "...... We don't think the Bundesliga needs the longer holidays that the public is asking for now, because no one knows exactly when the weather conditions in the winter will affect the game. Maybe it's November, or maybe it's between March and April. What we need most is a flexible schedule and a certain amount of free match days to accommodate games that have been delayed for various reasons. ”

So the DFB didn't make any changes at that time. Four years later, the tournament once again had to end early because of the World Cup on home soil. In this way, the first race of the second half was scheduled for the fifth of January, and this time they did not experience the same extreme weather as four years ago.

It wasn't until the 80s that the Bundesliga players really had a "winter break" instead of the so-called extended Christmas holiday. In the 1982-1983 season, the length of the winter break exceeded forty days for the first time. Two years later, in the 1984-1985 season, the winter break lasted more than 50 days, extending to two months for the first time. After that, it was more than seventy days.

In Germany, the reason for the winter break is that the cold and unpredictable weather in winter will disrupt the rhythm of the league, and in the past Bundesliga, the technical level was relatively low, when the weather was too cold, the turf of the stadium would freeze, the football would be difficult to see, and the weather would be even more white in case of heavy snow.

Today, though, that's not a problem. Since the 2008-2009 season, all Bundesliga and Bundesb teams have implemented geothermal systems at their home stadiums, as have some third division teams.

But the winter break, as a tradition, has been completely abolished, and only a slight adjustment in length is possible.

No one in the German club thinks the winter break is bad, especially after the Premier League as a reference. There is an argument that the German national team is doing better than the England national team in international competitions because the Bundesliga has a winter break that allows more German internationals to get enough rest and reduce the chance of injury, while the England national team is dragged down by the long and intensive Premier League, and when the season is over, when the national team games come, all the internationals are exhausted and cannot perform well in important international competitions.

If the current winter break can last for 70 days as before, then Zhou Yi can spend the Spring Festival at home.

But unfortunately, the current winter break is basically only more than 30 days.

If there's a World Cup, a European Cup, or something, it's even shorter.

On his return to Germany, he will head south with his team-mates to the warm Spain training camp, where he will prepare for the second half of the season.

It felt like a new season. (To be continued.) )