Premier League Releases Open Letter to Fans

The league continues to push for the return of fans in the
stadium.

With Liverpool’s players scattering to the winds for
international duty the day after the club announced its fourth
positive test for Covid-19 — Xherdan Shaqiri joined Kostas Tsimikas, Thiago
and Sadio Mané on the list on Monday — and as the pandemic
continues to wreak havoc across the globe, some skepticism as to
the jurisprudence of continuing the football season, both
international and domestic, is natural.

That sort of skepticism, however, appears nowhere in the open
letter the Premier League, Football Association, English Football
League, Women’s Super League, and Women’s Championship released
today, as the executives of the respective leagues make clear their
intention to reintroduce fans to the stadiums as soon as
possible.

The whole thing can , but in short, it cites the positive role
attendance at football matches can have in peoples’ lives as their
main motivation, and refer to a dozen reportedly successful test
events that have taken place, before listing off a number of
safeguards that would be put in place to make sure the coronavirus
won’t tear through football fans like it has the rest of the
country.

Now, while it is somewhat adorable that the executives in
question believe it isn’t painfully transparent that the main
driver behind all of this is purely a financial one — European
clubs are set to repay in excess of €2 billion to broadcasters for
matches not being played on schedule — it is mostly ghoulish.
Playing team sports in England right now has been proven to be a
bad idea, and adding fans to the mix is makes it a terrible
one.

Exactly what a workable solution for this season would be
remains unclear — although the unpopular idea of putting everything
on hold until a functional vaccine is available should probably be
much higher on the list than it is — but gathering thousands of
fans in the same venue while treatment is complicated and
inoculation is impossible absolutely isn’t it.