Tom Brady defended his shorter workweek after it was reported that the veteran Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback planned to take every Wednesday off through the rest of the season.
“The fact that I’ve worked weekends for the last 23 years—I do deserve one day off a week,” he said on the podcast Let’s Go! with Tom Brady, Larry Fitzgerald and Jim Gray.
With his comments, Brady—who at 45 is quite old by National Football League standards—is wading into a national debate about employee burnout and overwork that’s given rise to such labor-market trends as “quiet quitting” and “the Great Resignation.” Shorter workweeks are part of the debate, with some bosses using them as an enticement to lure back workers to the office.
Other elite athletes, like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles, have taken high-profile stands to assert work-life boundaries to protect their mental and physical health, stepping back from competition even amid intense pressure to perform.
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