This really is crazy.

While the rest of Europe’s prominent soccer leagues take off at least two weeks during the Christmas/New Years period … the English Premier League goes into overdrive, during what they call “the festive season”. The Premier League celebrates by going into hyperdrive.

It is madness.

It doesn’t begin on Boxing Day, December 26, but that is when things start to get weird. The whole of the league plays.

No matter when Boxing Day falls.

This year it was a Friday. The league had played the previous weekend, then came back on Friday with all 20 teams playing, and then they came out and did it again today. Almost all of the league, anyway — nine games involving 18 of the 20 teams, with Liverpool allowed to play on Monday.

Oh, and the Premier League also plays on New Year’s Day — four days later, this year. And then the following weekend, the Premier League shifts into FA Cup play.

That means that the whole of the league will have played four league matches in a span of 13 days. Or more than 10 percent of the 38-game schedule. In less than two weeks. As winter is really taking hold.

This, in an era when all elite soccer teams are based on long stretches of sprinting.

And the stakes are enormous. If your team happens to have a sketchy two weeks … it could mean relegation, and the loss of maybe $60 million in cash that comes with playing in the top flight.

Foreign coaches, new to the league, are regularly astonished at the way things are done in England.

Louis van Gaal, Manchester United’s first-year coach, from The Netherlands, today said something about how “science has proven 48 hours is not long enough” for players to recover from their exertions. And he probably is right.

He gave his team Christmas off — the only day between matches. He figured, probably correctly, that his guys were better off at home. (Resting, in theory.)

Other foreigners who ought to know better by now, like Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger, still complain about all these games jammed into a such short span of time.

The English public, however, seems unmoved. They demand a Boxing Day schedule, as their fathers enjoyed before them, as well as the January 1 games. (American football fans can relate to the latter.)

Get the lads back on the pitch! They’re paid to be fit! They’re young!

Several writers today seemed to suggest teams seemed to slow, in the second half. A lot less running. A lot more jogging. Even walking, which otherwise is never allowed in English soccer.

It will be interesting, once the four games are done, to see if someone made a dramatic rise in the standings. Or a fall.

What will it take to change this? Two or three top stars breaking down (groin and hamstring pulls, stress fractures) on the same day?

Maybe.

Probably not.

It makes no sense, but it’s tradition, and English fans demand it — and will continue to get it, no doubt.