Soccer Turns to a Subcommittee to Decide Team Doctor’s Role

Manchester City defender Vincent Kompany, left, during a 

Champions League game against Juventus last month. 

He injured his calf during the match. Credit Paul Ellis/Agence 

France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON — For a small country, Belgium has a remarkable and growing influence on what soccer is today.

It was a Belgian player, Jean-Marc Bosman, who 20 years ago convinced a European court that players should have the right to be free agents at the end of their contracts. It swung the balance of power from the clubs to the players.

The current group of Belgian players are very good indeed, and the country is among the favorites to win the European Championship next year. Among the stars are:

•Eden Hazard, the Chelsea winger who was voted the outstanding player in England’s Premier League last season.

•Kevin De Bruyne, who was judged to be the best player in Germany’s Bundesliga last year before he moved from Wolfsburg to Manchester City over the summer in an $85 million deal.

•Thibaut Courtois, also of Chelsea, who is one of the finest young goalkeepers in the world.

•Vincent Kompany, the captain of Manchester City and of the Belgian national team, who, when healthy, is among the most imposing defenders of this era.

Hazard and Kompany are at the center of an issue that should concern every professional player and official in the game today.

Both represented Belgium last week as it qualified for the Euro 2016 finals, and both were benched by their club’s coaches when they returned to the Premier League over the weekend.

Hazard was unwittingly the player at the center of the Chelsea storm in August after he seemingly was injured during a game against Swansea City. As he lay on the ground, the team’s doctor and physiotherapist ran to treat him on the field near the end of a 2-2 draw. José Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, was livid.

He called his medical staff naïve and impulsive, and he asserted his right to keep them off his bench. The doctor, Eva Carneiro, has not worked at Chelsea since then and is considering her legal options.

FIFA, hamstrung by its own scandals, had to react. It did so in the middle of September when Michel D’Hooghe, the Belgian doctor who heads the FIFA medical committee, led a meeting that decided a new subcommittee was needed to establish rules over how to care for players injured on the field.

D’Hooghe, who early in his career helped save the life of a Dutch player who suffered heart failure during a game in Bruges, Belgium, has spent his life involved in sports medicine and FIFA politics.

After he led the meeting that was called over how Mourinho effectively banned the team doctor, D’Hooghe said, “The most important thing a doctor faces is that where he or she has to judge on a medical issue, they cannot hesitate.”

The doctors, he said, must abide by their oath and intervene when a player needs assistance. However, the subcommittee — which will take time to organize, given how fractured FIFA is right now — will consult with coaches and managers as it makes its decision.

“We also need the voice of the coaches when we draw up this code,” D’Hooghe said. “It is important to take into account the fact that the doctors work as part of a group under the coach.”

Under the coach?

That was a point of contention at Tottenham Hotspur two seasons ago when goalkeeper Hugo Lloris suffered a concussion during a game. André Villas-Boas, then the manager of Tottenham, insisted that it was the manager’s call, not the doctor’s, to decide if the player was O.K. to keep playing.

These issues — and this failure to separate the roles of the medical and coaching staffs — are too urgent to wait for the deliberations of a subcommittee, followed by the inevitable approval by the FIFA executive committee.

There was a sharp reminder of those risks just a week ago in D’Hooghe’s own backyard.

Kompany played almost an hour of Belgium’s final 2016 Euro qualifier, a 3-1 win over Israel in Brussels. Kompany, who has been battling aches and sprains over the past few years, suffered no obvious signs of further injury during the game, but his manager at Manchester City, Manuel Pellegrini, was incensed nonetheless.

City’s medical staff has been working cautiously on rehabilitating Kompany after he suffered a recurrence of a calf injury five weeks ago. The strength — and the trouble — with Kompany is that he has long regarded himself as a so-called man’s man.

He puts the team before himself, and as a big, muscular defender, he boldly soldiers on whenever he is picked to play. After he broke down during a Champions League game against Juventus in September, City’s doctors advised that Kompany be rested so his calf muscle could fully repair.

When Kompany was asked to report to his national team, City approved, on the condition that he did not play. The Manchester medical staff advised that Kompany needed a minimum of five days’ intensive training before he should play again.

Kompany sat out Belgium’s first qualifier, then played the opening 58 minutes in the second. Belgium Coach Marc Wilmots told reporters, “I don’t need to ask a club if they want it or not. It is not the clubs that influence my decisions. Vincent is my captain, and it’s the last match at home. He is not injured; he’s ready, and when he’s ready, he plays.”

After returning to City, he didn’t play. Neither did Sergio Agüero, David Silva or Aleksandar Kolarov, who were injured playing for Argentina, Spain and Serbia, respectively.

FIFA rules are skewed in favor of the national associations. But it is the clubs that pay the salaries and medical bills of the players 365 days a year. And all they can do is await a new directive from the subcommittee and a Belgian doctor.