Football: the return of the Bundesliga
The Westfalenstadion, a huge stadium in Germany’s industrial Rhineland, is usually
“one of the noisiest places on Earth”, said James Gheerbrant in The Sunday Times. In normal times, when home team Borussia Dortmund play there against arch-rivals Schalke the ground is crammed with more than 80,000 fans, and “the noise levels crest well above 100 decibels”. But when the two sides met last Saturday, the stadium was eerily quiet – “a strange, sterile stage”. Welcome to football in the coronavirus era. Germany’s Bundesliga is the first elite sporting competition to get back in action, and before the first kick-off last week, all players and staff taking part in the first of the nine games they had left to play had been quarantined in hotels, where they were regularly tested for coronavirus. They then travelled to the games in several buses, so they could socially distance. Everyone allowed into the ground had their temperature taken; the balls were disinfected at half time.
Let’s be honest, said Luke Edwards in The Sunday Telegraph. This new version of football “won’t be anything like as enjoyable to watch”. There’s nothing inspiring about the sight of empty stadiums, or of substitutes wearing face masks, “even as they sat two seats apart in the stands”. Such things make the matches feel “functional and cold” – as if one were “intruding on a training session”. It is “the same game, with the same teams and the same players”, yet it isn’t “the same at all”. But there we are: this is “as good as it’s going to get for a while”. And it presents the Bundesliga with an opportunity, said Rory Smith in The New York Times. For years, German clubs have “sought to end the primacy of the Premier League in football’s global landscape”. They have opened offices around the world, “trying to pry open new markets and improve their commercial performance”. Now, for at least a few weeks, “the eyes of the world will be on Germany”.
And it could hardly have come in a more exciting season, said Raphael Honigstein in The Daily Telegraph. Bayern Munich have been champions for the past seven seasons; in all but one of those, they won the league by at least ten points. Yet now they are just four points ahead of Dortmund and only seven points separate them from Leipzig, in fourth place. Bayern have bounced back from the first half of the season, “their worst for a decade”. But Dortmund, who won 4-0 last Saturday, are one of Europe’s most exciting teams: in Erling Haaland, their 19-yearold Norwegian striker, and Jadon Sancho, their 20-year-old English winger, they have two of the continent’s most talented young players. In a league that is often settled a month early, this season has delivered a “really open” title race.