NO FANS BUT WE CAN SEE GAMES

I DON’T think football without fans can ever be the same – but I am still happy it is back.

Football is its fans. They are the lifeblood of the sport, they make the game what it is.

But we have to accept times have changed and, when things change, you move with them.

What else are we going to do, wait for a vaccine so stadiums can be full? That could take two or three years, it could be 10. There’d be no football left.

So let’s play without fans. At least there will be football. And let’s make the most of it.

For me, that means finding a way to get interactive crowd noise on to the TV screenings.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s not the same, but it’s something. And it works for me. I REALLY don’t want to hear players shouting, managers swearing and the thud of the ball on the TV, so yeah, I’ll take it.

I watched German football over the past week and where they allowed the option to have fan noise on TV, it was fine. Not the same, but fine. They cut in tight on the action, so there are few shots of totally empty stands and, with the noise, it works. It is exciting enough for those of us who have missed football and I think, as the technology develops, it can get better.

There was an experiment in Denmark a couple of weeks ago at Aarhus, and they had 10,000 fans on a Zoom video link, watching and beaming their reaction to the stadium. That could work here. There will be plenty of moaning and lots of derision about the lack of atmosphere. But football’s back. So accept it and make the most of it because – and I whisper this quietly – with all this talk of a second wave, we just don’t know how long we’ll have football for.