Football on the verge of going on a big vacation

UEFA are starting to work on the idea that European football seasons won’t be completed. 

They were very clear at the start of April that if leagues don’t play out their seasons, they’re at the risk of losing their Champions League/Europa League places and football will be finished for this season.

Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein looked upon the idea of the ‘isolated league’ for baseball, where players, coaches, officials are all holed up in one location to keep them free from the coronavirus.

Talking about the pitch, it is a compound where everyone stays, nobody in or out, for the months it would take to finish the season.

Everyone needs testing constantly, be it food deliveries and also the people who deliver too. If someone tests positive, anyone they’ve come in contact with has to isolate for 14 days, which probably puts a team out of commission, probably the whole league. 

The main point of this is that even playing football behind closed doors is a very complex arrangement, even if you can get hundreds of people isolated for long enough to keep them safe.

Recently, UEFA explicitly accepted that some leagues aren’t going to finish and Eredivisie, a league that produced a Champions League semi-finalist last season is almost on the verge of shutting up completely. The options are very few but the possibilities have been decreasing as each day passes by.

“Some special cases,” UEFA said, “will be heard once guidelines concerning participation to European competitions, in case of a canceled league have been developed”. Unless something changes very soon, it looks more and more like those guidelines are going to be put into place very widely indeed.

As advised by the WHO (World Health Organization), all international competitions should be suspended until the end of 2021. However, UEFA categorically denied the request as it would result in hefty losses and the board will make every possible effort to get things better again.

featured image credits- stokesentinel.co.uk