It will “lift the spirit of the nation”, Dominic Raab said a few days ago. The Foreign Secretary was not talking about the launch of a nationwide Covid-19 testing programme. He was referring to the plan (codename: Project Restart) to resume the Premier League football season, which has been suspended since 13 March, when it was revealed that Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, had tested positive for the virus.
Another ten days would pass before the country went into lockdown. The government was still flirting with the “herd immunity” concept when the football authorities called time, and would not have minded sport carrying on as usual; just as it wouldn’t mind a bit of footie action to jolly up the public right now.
From the outset, the football authorities’ original plan, which was to suspend games for a while, then resume some time in April, looked wildly optimistic. But English football, or, rather, the Premier League, has behaved as if things would turn out differently at home than they had elsewhere in Europe, where all of the league programmes have also been suspended since March. They turned out differently, yes, but not the way we hoped. They turned out worse. London — where 12 Premier League and Football League clubs are based — is the hardest hit capital city in the world in terms of cases, hospitalisations and deaths.
Yet the talk is still of restarting the season, for the Premier League at least and, one presumes, for the Championship. Everyone else has downed tools for good or soon will. Amateur and semi-professional football was brought to a halt on 24 March. The National League’s two divisions, that is the 5th and 6th tiers of the English football structure, voted to follow suit on 22 April, all for health and safety reasons. Tiers three and four, League One and League Two, should finally go into indefinite recess some time in the near future, as their clubs would lose money by playing behind closed doors. So better not to play at all, even if it is a tragedy for clubs who fear facing a £200m ‘hole’ by the autumn.
So Project Restart is not about enabling the millions of people who regularly play football in England to put the cleats on again. It is not about promoting health and activity in a population which is the third-most obese in Europe behind Malta and Turkey. It is not about protecting 5,300 amateur and semi-professional clubs which are the hearts and souls of their communities, and which stand to be ravaged by the pandemic, as they have close to no means at their disposal other than tickets at the turnstiles and the support of local businesses, most of whom probably have more pressing matters in mind than sponsoring their local side right now.
So is this really about “lifting the spirit of the nation”? The nation itself doesn’t seem so sure, if one is to judge by the findings of a recent Opinium poll for The Observer: 84% of respondents were opposed to the idea of competitive sport making a return; only 7% expressed themselves in favour.
Enthusiasm for a restart is lukewarm within the ‘football family’ itself, especially among the players. The prospect of being quarantined for up to two weeks before being allowed to run out and play in an empty stadium does not seem that enticing to them, to judge by what I have been told privately by quite a few of them over the past couple of weeks.
Yet ever more outlandish proposals have been made to facilitate the return of the Golden Calf and make it more palatable to the paying public when the feast is served. Sky Sports has studied the possibility of using CGI to add virtual crowds to the empty stadiums in which the games would be played. Gordon Taylor, the chief of the Professional Footballers Association, has suggested reducing the length of halves to lighten the players’ workload. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, Wednesday’s briefing by the Premier League to captains and managers of PL teams included advice such as “turn your face away when tackled”. More of these surreal ideas will probably get some airtime in the days and weeks to come.
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