Caution is paramount in return of sports
European socc er got it right, but can North America do the same?
As cautionary tales go, you could do a lot worse than Rostov FC.
The soccer team, which plays in the Russian top flight, ran into a bit of a pickle as that league launched its restart when six players tested positive for COVID- 19. Under the league’s safety protocols, that meant the entire squad would have to enter a quarantine period. Rostov, naturally, asked for its upcoming match with Sochi FC to be postponed. But Sochi, the cheeky devils, didn’t agree (Sochi FC evidently is the Houston Astros of the Russian Premier League). Rostov had to field a team of teenagers from its youth team, who were promptly thumped 10-1.
Or how about the Orlando Pride? The club in the NWSL, the women’s pro league that returns to action with a tournament beginning this weekend, pulled out of the competition after six players and four staff tested positive for the virus. Reports have said that some members of the team had gone out to bars, but given the situation in Florida at the moment, Patient Zero of the Pride could just as easily have been buying groceries or filling a prescription.
Then there is the PGA Tour. For a brief period on Wednesday it looked like the whole thing would be shut down again after a batch of Covid-related withdrawals, but instead it will carry on and hope that was the worst of it. There’s no single explanation for positive tests among the pro golf set, and there so far hasn’t been any Novak Djokovic- style cellphone videos of shirtless caddies boozing and dancing. But the golfers and their caddies aren’t under any kind of a bubble, and they just played in South Carolina, one of the many states with rising coronavirus cases.
The odd bit of good news in these situations — for the North American sports leagues trying to get back to business amid the pandemic — is that they might spook players into observing safety protocols. There have been enough positive tests among athletes in the four major sports, from those on the Dallas Cowboys to the Indiana Pacers to the Toronto Blue Jays, from the Sacramento Kings to the San Jose Sharks to the Philadelphia Phillies, that those who do ultimately show up for training camps and, eventually, games, would be well aware that they, despite being young and healthy, are not immune to the virus.
They might also look to Europe for examples of how professional sports can resume with no major setbacks, at least so far.
England’ s Premier League resumed with training camps in mid- May, and game play began just over a week ago. In its first round of COVID-19 tests last month, there were six positives among 748 players and staff, causing a frisson of doubt that its Project Restart was going to work. But as teams adjusted to the safety protocols, those numbers came down. The EPL has now had five testing periods in June, totalling almost 6,400 results, and had just five positive for COVID-19. The low numbers allowed the league to drop plans to have players quarantined in hotels for the start of the resumed season and, unlike the bubble scenarios planned by the NHL, NBA and MLS, players have stayed at their homes and used all their normal stadiums.
The story has been the same in Germany, Spain, and Italy, all of which have returned to play in something approximating normal conditions, albeit absent fans and with comical fauxcrowd sound effects added to some television broadcasts. The roar of a crowd that comes in two beats too late after a missed shot has been one of the pandemic’s unexpected joys. None of those leagues has been undone by a COVID-19 outbreak, and each has so far avoided the dreaded situation of a gamechanging player forced to sit out of a key match while quarantined.
But it’s also true that all of those countries made significant progress in beating back the spread of the coronavirus before they returned to play. Italy, Spain and Germany all are confirming fewer than 10 new daily cases per million people, while the United Kingdom is at around 12 new cases per million per day. The United States on Wednesday cracked 101 new cases per million ( Canada is at 6.8 per million). That contrast should be of particular interest to Major League Baseball, which plans to use home stadiums throughout the United States rather than an isolated bubble. The European model for return to play, minus the European success in bringing down the daily rate of COVID-19 infections.
While any one of those soccer leagues could yet be rocked by an outbreak, that they have avoided them so far suggests it can at least be done here. But given the difference in rates of viral spread between there and the United States, athletes on this continent will have to be ultracautious. Bubbles of steel, if you will. The setbacks already seen provide clear lessons: avoid risky settings, follow the rules, realize that a little slip-up can bring a positive test and all its associated negative impacts.
And don’t hold a tennis tournament/nightclub rave. Do not let Novak Djokovic be your guide. Or the Orlando Pride, for that matter.
they, despite being young and healthy, are not immune.