When will football return? | thearticle

During this strange period of lockdown, have you ever allowed your mind to linger on the question of when professional sport might resume? If you have, there are plenty of people ready to

condemn you as frivolous, unserious, even uncaring. They seem to think that we should wrestle with the bad news about Covid-19 without a break — as if only that mental struggle can help us

self-isolate and successfully come to terms with the disease’s consequences. How can you think about sport, they ask, when people are dying? It’s a grim, simplistic way to look at the world.

Even in the most appalling circumstances, people need relief, distraction and something to look forward to. It’s a little like the government’s insistence that it can’t discuss plans to

lift quarantine, in case the public’s resolve wavers as a result. Actually, a lot of us might feel like we had a greater incentive to keep going and try harder to tolerate our confinement.

Similarly, the idea that the football season will resume in June offers fans encouragement that their weekly regime will soon look a little brighter. It gives them hope. Alongside the vast

amounts of money involved in the Premier League, that is one reason that the game’s authorities are exploring ways to resume the season, which was abandoned in mid-March. Each of the Premier

League teams has either nine or ten games left to complete out of thirty-eight, amounting to ninety-two matches outstanding. But this year’s campaign was already slightly different, because

the race to become champions of England was effectively over, with more than two months of games still to play. Liverpool are twenty-five points ahead of their nearest rival, Manchester

City, and the club was poised to win its first league title in thirty years when coronavirus brought the season to a halt. Jurgen Klopp’s team need just six more points to formalise this

historic achievement. It’s unthinkable that this dominating performance should be struck from the record, but that’s exactly what some of Liverpool’s rivals, and the clubs in danger of

relegation, might prefer. So far, the Premier League has indicated that it intends to complete the season, but there is a mischievous campaign to declare the league null and void. Another

school of thought maintains that it should be cancelled if it can’t be completed before the 1st of July, when many players’ contracts run out. Admittedly, while the champions are all but

crowned, there’s uncertainty over which clubs will qualify for European competition and, even more significantly, which teams will finish in the bottom three and get relegated. Vast sums of

money depend on these questions, so they are not matters simply of sporting pride. You can understand why many clubs will not accept freezing the league table and declaring the season over.

Some teams in the relegation places believe that form and fixtures gave them a fighting chance to get out of their predicament. For the time being, the Premier League remains suspended until

football is deemed “safe and appropriate to resume”, but the clubs met again on Friday to consider their options. The EFL, which governs the three lower divisions in the professional game,

hopes to continue its season from the 6th of June, with matches taking place behind closed doors. In Germany, clubs in the top two leagues are back in training and plan to start competing

again next month, while similar preparations are underway in Italy. If the Premier League opts for this route and completes the season without spectators, there will be significant medical

and logistical problems to overcome. Had the season continued as expected, Liverpool would have won the competition playing against Crystal Palace at home on March the 22nd. If the situation

is the same when the fixture is rescheduled, supporters of the club are sure to want to congregate outside Anfield, just to be in the vicinity of such a long-awaited title triumph. For

health and public order reasons, this type of scenario worries the authorities. As a consequence, there is a suggestion that, instead of using the teams’ normal stadiums, neutral venues

could stage several matches in a row, making it more practical to implement a form of quarantine and clearing the backlog of games quicker. The FA has offered the use of its facilities at

Wembley Stadium and the national football centre at St George’s Park for this purpose. In a report in the _Times_, medical experts suggested that the plan would require “astronaut levels of

isolation” for players, officials and club staff, to avoid creating a new infection risk. The personnel involved would need to be tested for coronavirus before being admitted to “biodome”

conditions. This would create enormous controversy, if, as expected, testing is still limited to priority groups. It is possible that the government could ease the lockdown and start a

phased return to work as early as mid-May. For a significant section of the population, getting football back would boost morale and make the remainder of the crisis more bearable.

Footballers are obscenely well paid and they are fit young men — they are among the least likely groups in society to be affected severely by Covid-19. If the Premier League can limit the

risks, and other areas of the economy are being slowly reopened, football’s resumption could be a symbol of hope for the whole country.