Playing half a season in less than a month? Only in the A-League Women's.
The latest release of fixtures in both the men's and women's competitions has been dubbed the February Football Frenzy. Due to the disruptions caused by COVID-19 postponements, the leagues are racing to work through the backlog of matches.
What that means is 60 games played across 28 days; for the women specifically, it is 24 in 23 days.
There is an element of necessary evil to this jam-packed schedule which will see nominally semi-professional athletes play on weekdays and often with few rest days in between.
Melbourne Victory will play seven matches -- or half an ALW season -- between Feb. 4 and 26. Canberra United will squeeze five games into 15 days.
Football frenzy? It's quite the understatement.
But behind the alliteration is the tangible manifestation of a problem seen all too commonly in women's football. That of too few and too many games simultaneously.
FIFPRO, the global player's union, recently released an annual workload report that monitored women's playing schedules over a three-year period with the findings reflecting what fans and players have long suspected about the women's game.
Among those unsurprised by the results was former New Zealand international and current FIFPRO director of global policy and strategic relations, Sarah Gregorius.
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"At a very personal level? It was quite validating because it spoke a lot to what I had experienced and knew intuitively, also in the conversations that I've had in my current role with players who are still professional and international footballers," Gregorius told ESPN's The Far Post podcast.
"So in that sense, and I think that's actually why it's really important to do this type of research because a lot of the time, we seem to know these things instinctively or intuitively, but actually seeing that reflected in the data is really important because it gives you a much stronger platform to have the conversations with the decision-makers in particular."
The key finding described the concepts of "underload" and "overload." Relatively self-explanatory, the women's game globally is typified by underload -- long stretches of inconsistent games or straight inactivity. Then there are the erratic spouts of overload -- too many games in too short a space of time to allow adequate rest, which FIFPRO puts at 120 hours or five days.
With no rhythm or consistency to the match schedules and a gauge that points more often to under than overload, players are not being given the chance to perform optimally.
Even though this burst of overload in the ALW can be explained by COVID, the fact still remains that this period of density will be followed by the norm: underload.
Underload manifests itself in two ways in Australia: the short season and the long offseason.
Several Professional Footballers Australia (PFA) reports into the state of the ALW have noted that the league has less than half the regular season games of its global counterparts. The FIFPRO report discovered of the last two seasons Australia had the second-longest offseason breaks. It was beaten only by Japan whose longer break can be put down to the dismantling of the old Nadeshiko league and the beginning of the new, full-time, professional WE League.
Those within the women's game instinctively know that underloading is bad, but without the data or research to prove or explain it. FIFPRO's report fills that gap and illuminates the negative consequences.
"There's a couple of different ways to look at it. From a physiological loading point of view, it's pretty tough, right?" Gregorius said.
Training is not a direct substitute for matches. While it can be close, it's simply not the same thing.
"If you're not conditioned to play high-intensity matches, and then you have to play high-intensity matches in a very short period of time that's pretty tough. That's tough to manage from a form point of view. And from a physical point of view," she explained.
"The other side of it is ... one thing that is very evident in women's football is short term contracts across the board, whether it's professional or not, it's short-term contracts. If you have a short-term contract where you're going season to season and the season itself is short, every game from an employment point of view is like a cup final. You're playing for your next contract. And that's really tough if you only have 12 games to do that. I think it puts all sorts of different layers of pressure on players."
That pressure can turn into negative behaviours on an individual level including downplaying or not reporting injuries so as not to throw away precious game time.
"Also the other side of it is if you're not able to test yourself and regularly compete, what is that doing for your individual development of your talent and your ability to reach that potential and then exploit it and make a career out of it?" Gregorius asked.
"So there are just so many different things and so many different ways in which underload can manifest itself negatively for players at an individual level."
Underload isn't just harmful and unhelpful to players, it keeps the entire industry small as well.
"If there aren't enough competitions or competitive opportunities, how does the industry meet its potential as well?" she said. "And so I think there are so many different things and that's why we just really wanted to first of all, put forward the concept of underload and talk about how that is maybe contributing to us not all meeting our potential in that regard."
While COVID is to blame for the period of overload in the ALW fixture, COVID became an unavoidable part of the data collection in this report and was also responsible for exposing and intensifying pre-existing barriers and inequalities in the women's game.
Lack of professional status prevented many women's competitions across the globe from playing through the pandemic. But for these obstacles to be overcome there needs to first be a recognition of the obstacles' existence and difference from the men's game.
The catch cry of looking at both the men's and women's games as just football has so much merit when it comes to respect levels and opportunity. But trying to work through and overcome gender-specific issues through a lens of "just football" fails to acknowledge the very real and very different problems facing the two sections of the game and ultimately does a disservice to the women's game.
For Gregorius, gender-specific research like this report is a no-brainer. It's getting other people on board with that thinking that proves more difficult.
"I had a conversation recently where I sort of had to stop and be like, listen, can you stop thinking about women as small men?" she said. "So [being gender-specific] applies to just so many different things, whether you're looking at sports science, whether you're looking at medical health and safety standards, whether you're looking at workload, it seems so intuitive but, of course, it has to be gender-specific."
Gender specificity also needs to be present in the way in which the game is governed and with good reason.
"I think sometimes it's forgotten that we have one governance structure for two industries. We have a men's football industry and a women's football industry, but you have one governance structure. So you don't have a gender-specific governance structure either," Gregorius said.
"One of those industries for so long, has been so dominant, and it's actually tried to suppress the other industry, but you haven't addressed the governance of both of them.
"So we're still dealing with that in a lot of different ways. And that's why getting gender-specific data and evidence and research is so important because that's the only way we're going to start to unpack all of that kind of thing and actually bring more realization to the fact that it is two different industries."
Presently there is no gender-specific structure within the Australian Professional Leagues. The rebranding and its central tenet of equality are admirable and necessary.
But without gender-specific caveats within that, or a person or department whose sole role it is to think only of how decisions affect one of the two very specific sets of workers, the women are sometimes put in scenarios that don't serve their best interests.
Like 24 games of football in 23 days as semi-professional athletes.
So while the marketing of too much football is never enough and cheap tickets will entice fans, and the players themselves will give their all to make this work as they have been all season and for the entire history of the competition, the need for a laser focus on the women and the issues facing them has never been more necessary.