Shorter games under consideration for football's return, says PFA chief
Gordon Taylor has said the possibility of shortened matches is under active discussion as the Premier League continues to debate the logistics of a potential return to action next month.
The Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive believes halves could be cut temporarily from the standard 45 minutes as clubs, players, managers, medical experts and sports scientists fathom out the options for completing the season suspended by the coronavirus pandemic in March.
With matters complicated by physical distancing having prevented players from group training and participating in practice games during the lockdown, shorter matches could compensate for a collective loss of fitness.
The use of additional substitutes could also help to ease the physical load on professionals as the game scrambles to complete the league programme within what is expected to be a fairly tight timeframe. Coping with the sort of fixture congestion rare in normal times represents another hurdle to be surmounted.
“We don’t know the future,” Taylor told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “What we do know is what propositions have been put, what ideas have been put, the possibility of having more substitutes, games possibly not being the full 45 minutes each way. There’s talks of neutral stadiums. There’s been lots of things being put forward.
“Try to wait and see what the proposals are and then have the courtesy to let the managers and coaches and players also assimilate all those and come to a considered view.
“They [the players] are not stupid.
They will put safety first. There is a protocol being put together that is going to be presented, involving all medical experts and government medical experts.”
That presentation is scheduled for a Premier League shareholders meeting, delayed from Friday to Monday, with the resultant blueprint then put to players, coaches and clubs for analysis in the next fortnight. “The practicality of all the issues would be looked at club by club,” said Taylor, before admitting the whole process remained shrouded in a high degree of uncertainty. He does not expect matches to be possible before the middle of June.
The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, confirmed the government would welcome a resumption of the Premier League season. “I think it would lift the spirits of the nation,” he said. “I think people would like to see us get back not just to work and get to a stage where children can safely return to school but also enjoy some of those pastimes, sporting in particular.
“I know that the government has had constructive meetings with sports bodies to plan for athletes to resume training when it’s safe to do so. I can tell you that the culture secretary [Oliver Dowden] has also been working on a plan to get sports played behind closed doors when we move to the second phase.”
Raab mentioned the use of “test, tracking, tracing and other social distancing measures within what’s possible within a sporting environment”.