Calendar in meltdown
One effect of the coronavirus crisis has been to throw into stark relief the scheduling crisis affecting football at international and domestic level.
Swiss Football Association president Dominique Blanc has warned, after a ban on gatherings of more than 1,000 people in the country, that mediumsized and small FAs might soon be seeking financial support from both the world and European federations.
Meanwhile, ties in the east zone of the AFC Champions League have been postponed, as have regional qualifiers in Asia for the 2022 World Cup. And in Europe questions are being asked about the prospects for this summer’s Euro 2020.
Wholesale postponements in Italy, along with and government isolation orders, not only threw the concluding months of Serie A into doubt but were also poised to spread upwards and affect the Champions League and Europa League.
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin and general-secretary Theo Theodorakis have talked of decisions on a “case by case” basis, but they are as much in the dark as anyone else in not knowing whether the crisis will ease or extend.
However, there is one factor on which everyone gathered for a recent UEFA Congress in Amsterdam is agreed: the calendar is so tight that there is no room for manoeuvre, with no dates for wholesale postponements and rearrangement – even if anyone had a clue about when rearrangement might even be a practical possibility.
Club managers and players’ unions have railed for years at the damaging overload on the health of both football and footballers, but no decision-maker has taken notice while the money keeps rolling in from ratings-greedy sponsors and television companies.
Prospects for worldwide agreement on such an essential foundation of the competitive game will be hard to achieve when so many other issues need to be worked out in the game’s corridors of power.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino – who, presumably, was the target of Ceferin’s exasperated “egos” jibe to UEFA Congress – is still busy
Questions are being asked about the prospects for this summer’s Euro 2020
chasing the funds needed to underpin his pet project for an expanded Club World Cup in China in the summer of next year.
Not that Ceferin himself has it easy, as he and his own “stakeholders” still appear far away from agreement on an expanded format for the Champions League.
All of this apparently prompted US promoters Relevent to posit a Champions League-type summer tournament across the globe in summer 2021. Or was Relevent merely trying to remain relevant – so to speak – now that coronavirus has undermined this year’s schedule?
The cumulative effect of the coronavirus outbreak has been to confront the game with its most urgent challenge: a calendar in meltdown.