There's a specific type of anxiety that only exists in July, watching an Arsenal player line up in a different shirt against opposition your own club doesn't play, for reasons your own club has no say in whatsoever. Saka against Croatia in England's opener, in a fixture that still smells faintly of Zagreb '18, is the shirt-front image of it: the boy who terrorised Fulham in September wearing three lions and carrying a nation's particular brand of hope, six thousand miles from the Emirates and entirely outside Mikel Arteta's jurisdiction.

The counter-argument deserves saying properly before it gets waved away, because it isn't nothing. Tournament football sharpens players. The pressure is different in kind, not just degree, and a month of knockout football against elite opposition can leave a player returning in August with a competitive edge no pre-season friendly against a Bundesliga reserve side will replicate. Rice has said as much himself, in effect, after Qatar. The physical load, this argument runs, is no worse than a congested December at club level, and these are professional athletes whose entire working life is managed fatigue.

It's a fair case. It's also a case that only works in the aggregate and collapses the moment you look at any individual body, because fatigue doesn't average out. It accumulates in specific joints, at specific ages, in specific positions, and the World Cup doesn't know that Arsenal have a trip to somewhere unglamorous on the first Saturday of the new season. Here's how the risk actually breaks down, player by player.

6. Leandro Trossard

Belgium's squad has enough seniority to spare him — Lukaku playing his fourth World Cup, De Bruyne, Courtois, Witsel — which means Trossard's minutes are genuinely uncertain rather than guaranteed, and that uncertainty is protective. The risk with him was never overuse. It's the opposite: a player with his own injury history, sitting on a bench in North American heat for weeks, then asked to find sharpness in a September run of fixtures with almost no ramp-up. Rust is a fatigue too, just a quieter one.

5. Gabriel Martinelli

His Premier League season didn't reach the level of 2022-23; his Champions League form did, which tells you the dip was more circumstantial than terminal. Brazil still want his directness and press-resistance, but Neymar's recall ahead of João Pedro suggests Ancelotti values old certainty over new form, which might mean fewer Martinelli minutes rather than more. Nine of his twenty-two caps came in qualifying, so this is a player used to bursts rather than a guaranteed ninety. That is, oddly, the safest profile on this list.

4. Martin Ødegaard

The captain's armband carries its own physical tax nobody puts in a fitness report. Ødegaard already lost the back half of Norway's qualifying campaign to injury after playing the first five games that won it, and a player who has just finished a season including a Premier League title and a Champions League final arrives with less in the tank than the fixture list admits. Norway will lean on him because there is no version of their plan that doesn't.

3. Bukayo Saka

England's most reliable wide player for three straight tournaments now, which is precisely the problem: reliability gets rewarded with more minutes, not fewer, and Tuchel has no obvious alternative who does what Saka does against a low block. Croatia in the opener, a group England are expected to win, a knockout run England will be expected to make — every stage of that expectation is another ninety minutes on a body Arsenal have already managed carefully through two of the last three seasons.

2. Declan Rice

Tournament football is built for exactly what Rice offers: range, cover, the unglamorous defensive midfield work that turns a back four into a system. Which is also exactly why he'll play almost every available minute regardless of scoreline or opponent. There's no resting Rice in a competition England expect to go deep in. The bloke behind me put it simply enough in May: "They'll run him into the ground and thank him for it in November."

1. William Saliba

Nineteen minutes in Qatar four years ago, and everything since then a correction: a regular starter through the run to the Euro 2024 semi-finals, a fixture in France's qualifying campaign, usually alongside Upamecano, now arriving as a first-choice centre-back at a World Cup for the first time in his career. Centre-backs don't get rotated the way wingers do. There's no version of Deschamps' plan that rests Saliba unless he's carried off. That's the position that makes fatigue structural rather than incidental — every ninety minutes he plays for France between June and mid-July is ninety minutes Arsenal don't get back, on the one part of the pitch where age and legs matter most.

None of this is a reason to wish these players anywhere else in July. It's a reason to be honest in August.

Because a squad that looked sharp in May might look a yard off it against whoever Arsenal open against — not injury, not decline, just six players who spent their summer being brilliant for someone else first.