There are obvious reasons for the calendar:
- Aligning with other major European leagues makes sense for the transfer windows and when teams would be willing to sell their players.
- UEFA competitions also need us to start at the same time in regards to CL and EL qualifiers.
- We’d have to re-sign all PL contracts otherwise players would leave before a season is over. Same for staff.
- Gives us sufficient time in between a season ending and a WC/EC starting.
You mention WC 2022 being out of sync which is true but I’ve read reports of how they’ll sort that out where it changes things a matter of weeks - due to most leagues having a winter break - whereas this would be changing things for a matter of months. Also TV deals would need to change due to their end date whilst we’d have to see what impact it would have on the deals when only one major league is being played of a weekend and only a handful max of the matches are shown.
I also suspect fans, those keeping this thing all in existence with their support, revenue etc. would probably - outside of ones like yourself - not really want their schedules changing. Some families combine school holidays with away pre-season games etc. which wouldn’t happen anymore.
This isn’t a problem facing just the PL though. It’s all intereconnected, like dominoes - if our Football calendar shifts, it’s likely the rest of europe’s will too. If the calendar shifts, then the transfer windows move in line with the new schedule. If the transfer windows move, short term contract extensions would be signed to carry through to the end of that period.
Respectfully, you’re wrong about UEFA requiring all leagues to start at the same time. They don’t, several of it’s members, who have been regular participants of their tournaments (and even won it several times), operate in leagues that don’t run Aug-May. Russia is but one example.
I don’t know of one family who plan their trips around pre-season, but let’s go with your suggestion that there are loads who would be disillusioned by all this. They could still plan their pre-season trips, they’d just be doing it at a different time of the year, and only temporarily until the calendar shifted back to “normal”.
As per Wayne Rooney’s suggestion, If, due to a global crisis, a new Football calendar is forced to be created that see’s the current season end in October, purely hypothetically, then what would be so problematic with a transfer window commencing November 1st, a new season commencing in January and running to October 2021?
Follow that same path for the subsequent season and that means that the World Cup in Qatar could still safely be played as an end of season tournament, without any real jiggery pokery - call it a fortuitous scheduling happenstance.
