Steve McGookinLast Sunday was supposed to be the final day of the English Premier League season. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have expected the streets of Liverpool to resound for most of this week with a celebration of the city’s red half securing their first title since 1990, and their first of the Premiership era.
Instead, the focus of the football world was on the Bundesliga, as Germany’s top tier took the first tentative steps back to a modified playing schedule, behind closed doors, which could act as a roadmap over coming weeks for other formerly spectator sports. Any adverse effects on players or staff as the experiment continues will certainly be closely monitored.
Other leagues – and, more importantly, governments – across Europe have been considering their options. The Dutch and French leagues already abandoned their seasons, while Belgium this week agreed to follow suit. Spain and Italy, on the other hand, are building up to a planned resumption sometime next month.
UEFA, the European game’s governing body, had set a deadline of July 20 as a date by when leagues should be completed, in order to decide each nation’s participants in the lucrative Champions League and Europa League competitions. UEFA also wanted its member leagues to inform them by next week of their plans for restarting, if they were going to do so.
As Rory Smith wrote in the New York Times, by returning first, the Bundesliga turned a problem into an opportunity, stealing a march on its English rival.
“But the return of the Bundesliga is not so much proof of German soccer’s greed or its smooth running as it is a testament to a broader political reality. “We can be the first to start again because of our health care system,” Simon Rolfes, Bayer Leverkusen’s Sporting Director, said. “We are thankful to have the opportunity.”
While it’s still difficult to accurately compare countries’ approaches and relative success in dealing with the virus, national healthcare resources and political management of the crisis are inevitably a huge part of the equation for when – and indeed whether – football might return.
The Premier League had identified 12 June as a date for a possible resumption under its ‘Project Restart’, but there appears to be an expectation that this will be pushed back further. It’s even possible that the Championship, and England’s other lower leagues, could end up restarting before the top division. With players such as Watford’s Troy Deeney saying he wouldn’t return to training this week over fears for his family’s health, Premier League authorities will have to address ongoing safety concerns and issues around testing before being able to move forward.
In Scotland, where non-contact sports like tennis and golf will be able to start again next week, agreement was reached that the football season would not be completed, meaning Celtic became Premiership champions for the ninth season in a row.
While the Northern Ireland Executive’s roadmap for loosening restrictions – including a plan for a number of sports – is not date-specific, the local NI Football League is seeking an extension to the current season, in the hope of completing it. The FAI in the south, meanwhile, is planning a mini-tournament in July behind closed doors as a dry-run for a possible return of the League of Ireland in August.
For Rugby, which obviously has different considerations of “close contact” between players during games, a possible return to contests between Irish teams is being talked about for the end of August. On Friday, the IRFU laid out details of its ‘Return to Train and Play’ roadmap.
But whatever the sport, and whenever it returns, the absence of fans in the stands is going to be a reality for some time to come and one that will require significant adjustments for players and spectators alike.
A ‘new normal?’
As the head of the World Health Organization’s Europe office said recently: “It’s very important to remind everyone that as long as there is no vaccine and effective treatment, there is no return to normal. This virus won’t simply disappear, so the personal behaviour of each of us will determine the behaviour of the virus.”
Likewise, many medical professionals believe it’s unlikely that mass spectator events where fans are in close contact will take place this year, or until an effective vaccine for Covid-19 is widely available, leading to any kind of restoration of public confidence.
For the fans themselves, coming to terms with that can be like dealing with a bereavement, and even if that’s perhaps not the most sensitive analogy in current circumstances, psychologists recognize its reality. Adam Kilgore, in the Washington Post, writes that “The absence of games should feel trivial against the scale of suffering wrought by the coronavirus, and yet it lingers as a low-frequency ache… A certain level of privilege is a prerequisite for feeling sports withdrawal. And yet it is undeniably there.”
In the US, where 60 per cent of Americans identify as sports fans, baseball – the national pastime and the glorious, slow, daily rhythm of summer – was about to begin its regular season in March when it was suspended because of the pandemic. Now, discussions are under way on a plan to return to competition around the 4th of July, in a modified, shortened season, with no fans and necessarily drastic changes to schedules and rosters; as well as what would pass for a post-season. MLB and the players’ union are set to intensify their talks over this coming week, with the main negotiations around player safety and – perhaps inevitably – money.
Dave Zirin at The Nation calls the MLB plan a “leap of faith built on a house of cards.” He writes:
“If this plan sounds like a sclerotic facsimile of a legitimate baseball season, it is. If it sounds like a possible health catastrophe waiting to happen, it is. But the fans, desperate for some kind of sports, are ready to see the players risk the virus while franchise owners collect checks a safe distance away. The owners, desperate for their television broadcast payola, are ready to see the players risk the virus. Members of the media, desperate for something to broadcast and hot topics to discuss other than the career of Michael Jordan, are in a full-scale pressure campaign to see the players risk the virus. Many of the players, not willing to burn off a year of their careers, are also ready to risk it all.”
So with the immediate future of baseball – and all major professional sports – still shrouded in uncertainty, at the college level, where sports are often seen at least as important as academics, US campuses are gearing up for the return of their student athletes, with plenty of questions over how to manage interactions inside and outside the training facilities.
And certainly in the bigger picture, like every other aspect of our lives, there is always money and politics to consider too.
For example, MLB, a $10bn organization, has said it would stand to lose $640,000 for every game played behind closed doors. For the English Premier League, there is apparently £1bn at stake if the season isn’t completed. With the lower leagues set to feel the pinch the most, Gavin Willacy writes at The Guardian that English football as a whole “should prepare for a new financial reality” post-coronavirus.
While Boris Johnson has backed Project Restart, the British government’s scientific advisers have been noticeably cautious about even considering public events with crowds in the absence of a vaccine.
By contrast in the US, Donald Trump, whose response to the virus over the next six months is going to be almost entirely conditioned by his re-election campaign, has made no secret of his desire to restart sports, tapping into the easy populist appeal of liberating Americans from the “invisible enemy”.
The president, who recently said “Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back”, will have been encouraged by the return of Nascar last week, albeit in front of empty stands, while as a proprietor of golf resorts he found time to call into a live PGA charity broadcast to say how much he missed watching tournaments.
“We need sports in terms of the psyche, the psyche of our country,” he said. “I think some tremendous things are going to be coming out very soon.”
As the country continues its delicate, uncertain process of “reopening,” I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
The return of professional sports is heavy with symbolism. It is a representation of “normality” in a world that is perhaps now permanently detached from how we previously perceived such a concept.
Even that phrase “the new normal,” which seems to have slipped into everyone’s vocabulary these days, undersells in its banality the idea of just how much the everyday things we took for granted have changed.
But for now, and likely for a while, there won’t be much joy in Mudville.
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Read Northern Slant’s latest Virus Update, with links to all of our Coronavirus-related articles.
Author’s note: ‘Wait ‘Til Next Year’ is the title of a wonderful book by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about her love for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
You might also be interested in this article: Football Wins, from the happier times of just a year ago, when the country’s attention was focused on Brexit and the upcoming Champions League final between Liverpool and Spurs.
(I took the photograph at the top of this article last summer at Camden Yards in Baltimore, where fans of the Orioles have been practicing social distancing in the stands long before it became cool.)
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