Postponements
Euro 2020 and Olympic Games delayed until next year
Coronavirus is no respecter of people, borders or calendars. This is the ultimate challenge for all football officials, whether at international, regional, national, league or local level.
The rush for easy money by jamming up the current calendar with a ragbag of competitions meant that, come the COVID-19 crisis, there was nowhere to run. There are no spare days or weeks or months in these short-sighted, entangled schedules.
UEFA and CONMEBOL presidents Aleksander Ceferin and Alejandro Dominguez have talked, optimistically, of the day when their international club competitions can resume. Ceferin understands that this is possible only when domestic seasons have been resurrected because instant income will be needed by all the clubs, both from TV and sponsors and through the turnstiles.
Most major football nations have seen gatherings of any size prohibited. Social and entertainment events have been cancelled. Local travel has been curtailed. Most international flights have been grounded and the airlines are going bust.
There is no end in sight. Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, posited in late
March that it could be six months before the UK returned to anything like normal. And while “social distancing” means no live crowds it also, presumably, rules out all forms of bodily contact sport. So, tennis and golf would be OK. And maybe cricket. But football and rugby certainly not.
Stretch these doomsday forecasts across Europe and football’s preferred resolution of completing the season will not be any time soon. As Kevin De Bruyne has cautioned, the longer the suspension the more time players will need to regain appropriate fitness levels. So, add in up to a further month.
World Cup qualifying ties have been postponed from Asia to South America. The Copa America and Euro 2020 have been pushed back a year to 2021. UEFA’s eco-unfriendly, multi-venue championship was always a joke. Now it’s a bad one. That was not Ceferin’s fault. But he is the man landed with Michel
Platini’s poisoned legacy and he must see it through to the end.
Euro 2020 is a perfect example of the price the game is paying for extravagance and greed. The qualifying crossover with the Nations League – which was widely welcomed at the time – means that 16 teams are still to play out qualifying ties in indefinable time slots.
Different countries have been besieged by coronavirus at differing times and with differing impacts. How and when any of them may emerge from lockdown is impossible to calculate.
In Italy the first country markets reopened at the start of April, as did some garden centres in Germany. Simultaneously the United Kingdom was still at least one or two weeks away from the predicted peak of depredation. In England, scientists reported London as being “one week ahead” of the rest of the country.
In all of this, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, for all his sporting omnipotence, has been impotent. He has issued the appropriate messages about the priorities of public health and was probably relieved to kick into the long grass his widely derided plan for an expanded Club World Cup in China in 2021. UEFA has cancelled some but not all of its age-group tournaments. This is because several also act as qualifying events for FIFA’s age-group world cups. No one knows whether these qualifiers can even be played in time to suit FIFA’s own calendar. Meanwhile, Infantino has promised to conjure up a multimillion-dollar relief fund. How relieved he must be that FIFA possesses those vast cash reserves
on which he and his presidency rivals cast such scorn four years ago. Sepp Blatter and Jerome Valcke did not get everything wrong.
Coincidentally, FIFA’s proposals include a season-ending extension of contracts. But that must depend on goodwill since it would probably be unenforceable in law. Also, as stated, no one knows what is meant by “the end of the season”.
Further problems were created for UEFA by the International Olympic Committee’s long-delayed but inevitable postponement of its Tokyo Games until July and August of next year. Any thought of running the 2021 Women’s Euros straight after the men’s finals was kicked out of the window. The Olympics is highly important for women’s football so the two competitions cannot overlap or run back-to-back.
Also, since the Women’s Euros is being staged in England it is impossible to push it back into the autumn when the Premier and Football League dream of filling their stadia again. That takes the knock-on effects of the pandemic into 2022.
Europe is not the world – although its football administrators often act as if it were – but it is by far the richest corner. It drives the international football economy and the longer it remains in lockdown the more extensively the worldwide game suffers.
Playing the blame game has no value as these are surreal times for individuals and organisations.
UEFA was content to go ahead with its congress in Amsterdam at the start of March, though subsequently the FA presidents of Serbia and Switzerland both contracted the virus. As Italy and Spain began to suffer so UEFA still went ahead with Champions League ties featuring Atalanta (v Valencia) and Atletico Madrid (v Liverpool).
But fear was setting in. UEFA followed several leagues in scrapping the prematch handshake then postponed the Champions League returns featuring Manchester City v Real Madrid as well as Juventus v Lyon. Two Europa League matches between Spanish and Italian
clubs were postponed because of the health controls and curtailing of flights, while Spain postponed La Liga for two weeks when Real Madrid’s staff were quarantined after a coronavirus case in their basketball side.
Denmark, the Irish Republic and Holland called a halt to public sports events and the English Premier League was halted after Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta and three Bournemouth players were diagnosed.
UEFA summoned a series of videoconferences which postponed Euro 2020 as well as suspending the Champions and Europa Leagues. Four Champions League second-round ties remained uncompleted: Manchester City v Real Madrid, Juventus v Lyon, Barcelona v Napoli and Bayern Munich v Chelsea.
The Final in Istanbul on May 30 was postponed as well as the entry deadlines for next season’s club competitions.
UEFA’s strategy was creating summer space for national leagues to be completed once the pandemic had subsided, but that presupposed one size fitting all. Three Dutch clubs – Ajax, PSV and AZ – demanded that their league be declared at an end. Ajax technical director Marc Overmars said: “The league is dead. Life is more important.”
The Belgian league went one step
Europe is not the world...but drives the international football economy and the longer it remains in lockdown the more extensively the worldwide game suffers
further by declaring Club Brugge as champions without bothering about the last matchday and the mini-league for European places.
That provoked a first sign of panic at Nyon. UEFA and the European Leagues organisation warned that the national associations risked seeing their clubs banned from club competitions if they halted domestic campaigns now. Really?
Hard to imagine UEFA barring Real Madrid and Barcelona if Spain were to declare the 2019-20 season null and void.
An example of the confused responses to coronavirus was the storm which erupted in England over whether Premier clubs were justified in applying for government subsidies for the wages of non-playing staff. Liverpool and
Tottenham Hotspur, two of the world’s richest clubs, ceded sympathy by not, at least, delaying such action.
When matches do restart, will they be behind closed doors? What happens if one player tests positive and everything is called off again? Completing the 2019-20 season could take up until December at that rate.
Football is at the mercy of events. To pretend otherwise is illogical at best, impractical at worst.
Different countries will emerge from the coronavirus tunnel at different times under different conditions.
UEFA’s vision of a wondrous specific day when all Europe’s teams walk back out together simultaneously is fanciful, to say the least.