Football’s elite must face risk and play the game
Even as the UK’s lockdown is loosened, many seem hell-bent on signalling that it is not yet safe to come out from behind the sofa. Take the signs beside our desolate motorways, which implore drivers to ‘‘stay home’’, despite the British Government’s message softening to ‘‘stay alert’’ four days ago.
The latest movement in this symphony of doom is conducted by the Premier League, several of whose players protest that they are being put at unconscionable risk by a return to training.
Never mind that their facilities are being deep-cleaned to a standard that would embarrass the most fortified biocontainment laboratory, or that their exposure to others is more limited than on the average London bus.
Instead, the talk is only of an imminent danger of deaths. ‘‘I don’t give a f..k about the nation’s morale,’’ says Danny Rose. ‘‘People’s lives are at risk.’’
Let us unpack this a little. The Covid-19 mortality rate for those aged between 20 and 29, the bracket into which the vast majority of top-flight players fall, is 0.03 per cent.
As a male in that group, you are statistically twice as likely to die of another cause entirely. Equally, these are athletes at peak conditioning, with zero incidence of obesity and almost none of the comorbidities known to increase susceptibility to the virus.
Where are these reassurances, though, in the tortured debate about bringing football back? There is an obsession with the arguments for why the Premier League cannot resume safely – as seen in conjecture that a third of players have undiagnosed exercise-induced asthma – rather than the clear evidence for why it can.
For a start, matches are not even expected to be held until June 19, a monthlong window that gives time for the downslope of infections to continue and for an adequate testing system to be built.
And yet claims persist that players are sacrificial lambs, helpless pawns in a malevolent experiment designed only to sate the public’s restlessness to be entertained. As Gordon Taylor, their ever-voluble union chief, puts it: ‘‘They don’t want to be seen as guinea pigs.’’
Why would they ever be perceived as such? Already, they are being guaranteed protections that would be beyond most other professions, with a rigorous schedule of tests and meticulous decontamination of every corner of their training grounds.
Would that such support could be offered to the central London workers who had to return on crowded public transport, an inescapable risk for those without zone two parking spots.
Unlike elite footballers, they had no choice in deciding when or how to start earning a living again. They faced the dangers head-on, only to be shamed by the tiresome corona-Stasi for failing to socialdistance.
On the subject of distancing, there was no more sorrowful image this week than that of children going back to school in France with large squares drawn around them in chalk. In the long run, is this seriously a price that society is willing to tolerate? To force fiveyear-olds into a world of state-sanctioned isolation, when the danger to their own health is negligible? It is the same calculation that confronts footballers. Unless they want to shelter in a cupboard in anticipation of a vaccine that might never come, they eventually have to determine what constitutes an acceptable risk.
The wisdom of perpetual lockdown is fraying. On Thursday, the Office of National Statistics declared that over the past fortnight, just 0.27 per cent of people outside care homes, hospitals or other institutional settings would test positive for Covid-19. On the surface, that is not a figure that justifies the indefinite postponement of almost everything that makes life worth living. It is certainly not one that suggests Premier League players are in immediate mortal peril.
The endless to and fro of Project Restart, or Project Stop-Start as it might more accurately be called, has gone on long enough.
The attempts to assuage players’ concerns have been extended to the point of absurdity, with recommendations that they can turn their faces away during a tackle.
When Premier League officials sought to convince players this week that a training session was safer than a visit to the supermarket, they were reproached for being callous, prompting their indulgence of such ludicrous ideas as blind tackling.
Ultimately, they need to have the courage of their convictions. Research carried out by this newspaper indicates that for the young, there is significantly less chance of dying from coronavirus than being robbed or seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. Mathematically, the notion that the Premier League’s finest are being needlessly thrown in harm’s way does not hold water.
The ethical objections are hardly persuasive, either. There is an insistence that we are wasting energy on reviving football that we could better devote to finding a vaccine.
Believe it or not, the two processes can happen concurrently. Risks can never be eliminated, merely minimised. For the game, the period for appeasement and delicate compromise has passed. It is time to play.