We need to wake up about what COVID-19 means for football
Forget debating about how to complete the season; the game will literally never be the same again
It’s been mildly absurd to witness the on-going debate about the mechanics and implications of ‘completing’ the 2019-2020 season. Though I’m sure this is of some interest to many people, it does feel slightly like we’re playing soccer with a chunk of ice on the sinking Titanic, debating whether a goal should have counted or not.
I don’t want to sow panic or play Cassandra, but if things carry on as they are (more on this later), the reality is we will likely not see another live professional football match until 2021 at the earliest. In the interim, the TV rights ‘bubble’ we have talked about for the past two decades will have imploded, taking along with it the fortunes of broadcasters across Europe and North America. Many smaller clubs will wind down and completely cease operations. Players, many of whom will have gone unpaid for a long period, will increasingly take early retirement, beginning with the precarious lower leagues and, over time, enveloping the Premier League and other big European leagues as well.
The impact on the many tertiary industries that rely on football—journalists, consultancies analysts, vendors, etc.—may be incalculable. So if and when football does return, it may resemble, for a time, that ‘Yankees’ game in Interstellar.
Things are not normal, and I think we need to look at these truths head-on and accept them as adults. As someone who suffers from anxiety, I know intimately that this is something that is easy to write, extremely difficult to do.
So the question is: what can we do?
First, I think it’s important to give yourself time to accept what is happening and to mourn. A lot of people are taking in comfort in revisiting old debates, providing data for historic seasons, ranking all-time greater headers etc., and this is good and healthy. But once the reality of what we’re going to face dawns on all of us, we will need to accept that we’re not going to go back to normal.
I would therefore urge journalists, analysts, anyone involved in football reading this to consider making plans to pivot. Perhaps that means exploring how your skills will be useful over the course of this crisis, which could mean switching careers. Or it could mean exploring how to use your connections within football to help collectively come together to devise workable strategies to help steward the game through what is probably its greatest crisis since the Second World War. We will need to think clearly about what we are going to do over the next year and a half.
Now, that said, things could change. We’re learning things about the novel coronavirus every day. Though I’m not an epidemiologist or a public health expert, I think there is a lot of promise in the notion of deploying mass testing as a kind of proto-societal vaccination, which would effectively allow us to identify people with the disease, isolate them until they recover, and keep strict restrictions on movement in place until we generate a vaccine. In this case, football may be able to eventually make some sort of early return. So there is some room for taking a wait-and-see approach.
But hope shouldn’t be the basis of planning, kind of the running theme of this newsletter! We need to accept the possibility of a worst-case scenario, and plan for it—both as organizations and as individuals. Though I have a very limited platform, I will do my best in helping in this role.
Finally, I will end on some good news—football will never die. The game will always, always be with us. It has survived the two world wars, the Spanish flu, and Margaret Thatcher. Though we may all need to temporarily walk away from the game, it will be there when we are able to return. We all need to stay strong. We ARE going to get through COVID-19. The reality is we are going to lose loved ones, neighbours, friends. No one will be unaffected. But football is immune, and that alone should give us hope.