Life will never be the same as COVID 19 is here to stay. It’s no different for football. Lionel Messi in an interview said, “Football, like life in general, I think will never be the same”. The beautiful game we all enjoy has taken a huge blow with the outbreak of this pandemic. Leagues across the world went on a halt, and are struggling to resume the suspended season.
The Ligue 1, Eredivisie and a few other leagues have ended their seasons and are waiting for the risk of the pandemic to reduce to a reasonable level, for them to start a new season. These countries took the decision based on their assessments of the outbreak.
On the other hand, the top four leagues in the world; The English Premier League, The Spanish La Liga, The Italian Serie A and the German Bundesliga are slowly getting back to continuing their respective leagues. The Bundesliga has already kicked off with matches being played behind closed door. The La Liga will resume on June 11, 2020 closely followed by the Serie A, which will also resume on June 20, 2020. The EPL will later follow suit.
The resumption of these high class leagues come with their own problems. One thing for sure is that all the matches, at least for the time being, will be played behind closed doors. This will affect the clubs financially as they make a significant amount of money from gate proceeds. These monies go a long way to help the clubs in their day to day activities.
Clubs across all leagues can now effect as many as five substitutions. Since football is a contact game, there will always be the risk of contracting the deadly virus. Because of this, the German Bundesliga has kept in place a lot of measures to reduce contact as much as possible. Goal celebrations are to be done in a social distancing manner, and there is distancing on the benches among other measures. But the threat still looms.
Troy Deeney, captain of Watford FC in the English Premier League has refused to attend training sessions that recently resumed, sighting the fact that he may contract the virus and end up infecting his son, who is only 5 months old with “respiratory difficulties”, with it. So he just won’t take the risk.
Players like Serge Aurier of Tottenham Hospurs, Danny Rose of Newcastle United, Raheem Sterling of Manchester City, among others are all skeptical about the resumption of the EPL, although the EPL announced they had no positive results after their fourth round of testing. They tested 1130 players and club staff.
Some clubs have already agreed on pay cuts with their players. Bayern Munich’s players have accepted a pay cut until the season ends. Other players in other clubs have also accepted a pay cut to ease some burden on the shoulders of the clubs.
All these point to the fact that, there are interesting times ahead for the beautiful game.
Written by: Yaqub Shareef
Matrix 