‘League season will not recover from this break’
FOR now, keep calm and wait to finish the season.
The Premier League have set the extremely ambitious date of April 4 as the end of their fixtures suspension, although even the plan with UEFA to finish all leagues by June 30 looks a tough ask at the minute.
As the most important competition in each country, the league is being treated as a priority with cups the more likely to be targeted in any scheduling cuts.
What makes the league so valued though (apart from all the money it produces) is that it is an ultimate test of the best team in each nation, the squad that can turn up every week and produce performances that better every one of their competitors over 38 games.
At a time when it is impossible to envisage when one game could be played again, how about 92?
That is what the Premier League faces, with just under a quarter of games for the season still outstanding.
Sixteen teams have nine games left, with City one of four teams to still have to play ten.
Even if you exclude the FA Cup, the Champions League, and anything else going on, it is unrealistic to expect less than a month to fit all of those league fixtures in.
Given that the Arsenal and Real Madrid squads were quarantined before any decisions were made about suspending competitions, there is every chance that it could happen at other clubs to further disrupt the calendar.
However, even if the time to fit in all the games while allowing players sensible levels of recovery miraculously happened, it would still not be a level playing field for every club to restart.
Football is not a game of equality but there is no chance of any side being at the physical and football heights that they were when everything was paused. Knockout competitions, given they are more down to one-off scenarios anyway, would not be as severely affected by the period of isolation. In European competition, one-legged ties are not the same as playing a team home and away but there is a precedent for that – and a final four finale – in the UEFA Youth League, which starts off every season running in parallel to the Champions League. And the FA Cup only needs to squeeze in seven more matches.
But the disrupted rhythm of the league cannot be recovered. In the unlikely chance that every team manages to complete 38 league games, the final places in the 2019/20 season will all have to be marked with asterisks to mark the circumstances beyond the control of football as an industry.
When it is impossible to envisage when one game could be played again, how about 92? Simon Bajkowski