Bundesliga’s return shows the soulless ‘new normal’
Fans sorely missed in Germany’s top division Premier League will take heart from resumption
Football is back, and while it looks and sounds very different, and will not be anything like as enjoyable to watch, it will do for now.
The eyes of the world fell on the Bundesliga yesterday as the European country with the most impressive containment of coronavirus also became the first to allow league football to resume behind closed doors.
Where Germany has led, others intend to follow, but the new normal is not going to be as good as the old.
What has started in the Bundesliga is likely to spread across the Continent and what happened this weekend will likely help convince the Premier League it is right in its determination to resume next month.
In Hoffenheim, Augsburg, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Leipzig and Frankfurt, players arrived in empty stadiums wearing face masks as well as their usual tracksuits and headphones. The substitutes wore their masks even as they sat two seats apart in the stands, as did everyone else other than those on the pitch.
There were a few hundred at most in attendance; support staff, coaches, backroom staff, television crew and match officials. In Dortmund, at least, each of their four goals in their impressive win over Schalke was greeted with polite, muted applause, smiles and attempts to avoid contact wherever possible.
It felt functional and cold, but this is the new reality. Games will be played, fixtures fulfilled, but little more. Perhaps those who always watch games on television will find the adjustment less difficult, the uneasy quiet easier to accept, but for many this will be football without soul and, therefore, joy.
It reminds us that without fans inside stadiums or gathered together to watch on television, football loses many of the things that make it special.
At its best, football is a collective, immersive experience of shared emotions. It is a tribalistic assault on the senses: the noise, the colour, the action. It is more than just a game because of all these things.
And a fixture such as Borussia Dortmund v Schalke, a Revierderby between bitter rivals in Germany’s old industrial belt of the Ruhr Valley, would have showcased all the above and more.
It is a game that means the most to supporters, but with those fans noticeable by their absence, it felt more like intruding on a training session.
Behind closed doors it became just another game between a team in yellow and black and a side in blue and white. It was football, but not as we know it.
It is the same game, with the same teams and the same players, the same rules and the same stadiums, but it is not really the same at all.
Dortmund looked better from the start, even with one of their star players, the England international Jadon Sancho, confined to a substitute’s role, but as they tore Schalke apart, even they looked a little awkward.
The celebrations started when the Bundesliga’s most exciting wunderkind, Norwegian Erling Braut Haaland, scored his 10th goal in nine games since joining from Red Bull Salzburg in January.
Haaland rejected a move to Manchester United and even in these sanitised conditions, it was apparent why he is the hottest young player in Europe, the finish controlled, the cross from Thorgan Hazard, younger brother of Eden, perfect.
Schalke, managed by former Huddersfield manager David Wagner and with Jonjoe Kenny, on loan from Everton, in midfield, barely landed a telling blow and were two goals down at halftime as Raphael Guerreiro notched the second. If there was one bonus of being in a silent stadium, it was the crisp sound of the ball hitting the back of the net as he drilled it across the goalkeeper into the bottom corner.
The contest was over three minutes into the second half as Schalke were caught on the counter and Hazard hit an early shot that the goalkeeper should have saved.
And the home team playing without any real home advantage made it four on the hour as Haaland set up Guerreiro for his second.
Dortmund celebrated with their usual salute to the “Yellow Wall” at the end of the game, but with nobody there, it made you want to switch off, or at least look away.