Summit set to squeeze vaccine dodgers
PRESSURE will grow on unvaccinated footballers at the English Premier League’s emergency meeting of clubs tomorrow, as a raft of fixtures again fell by the wayside due to Covid infections.
Clubs are pushing for players who refuse vaccination to be segregated in training and travel due to their increased risk of spreading infection.
As the Premier League battle to save their traditional Boxing Day programme, a number of clubs will call for new, stricter protocols, while fans want more coherent pre-match rules to avoid farcical late cancellation, with Aston Villa v Burnley called off just over two hours before kick-off yesterday.
The Premier League will continue to resist calls for a firebreak to all fixtures and attempt to play games where they can, but should a de facto pause be caused by postponements, it could be the first time since the Second World War there was no elite-level football in England on Boxing Day.
Anxious to avoid the kind of large-scale call-offs seen south of the border, clubs in Scotland have already held Zoom summits in order to find ways to navigate through the crisis. Players in Scotland’s top flight will begin daily testing from tomorrow, while other measures are also being put in place.
With the Premier League eager to boost their poor vaccination record, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has said it would now be difficult to sign an unvaccinated player, reflecting a growing feeling among clubs that unvaccinated players are undesirable as potential transfer targets.
‘If a player is not vaccinated at all, he is a constant threat for all of us,’ said Klopp. ‘He doesn’t want to be a threat, it’s not that he thinks, “I don’t care about the others”, but he is (a threat).
‘From an organisational point of view, it gets really messy. We’d have to find different scenarios.
‘He has to change in a different dressing room, he has to eat in a different dining room, he has to sit in a different bus. If you really want to follow the protocols, it is incredibly difficult to do.’
Staff at another club have even suggested not allowing unvaccinated players into the stadium red zone, which is the dressing-room area and in-field for players and staff.
That would bar them from playing and as such they wouldn’t receive support from most clubs, but it reflects growing frustration in football that players are jeopardising games by their refusal to be vaccinated.
The English Premier League have by far the worst vaccination rate of the major leagues in Europe, with only 68 per cent fully vaccinated by October, although that figure is believed to have now improved.