Finishing the Premier League season + Follow
THÔNG TIN CHI TIẾT
Finishing the Premier League season
Rob O'Connor says the future of soccer under tip itself could be in the balance if the current season is not completed - no matter what.
As football slowly starts lớn come to terms with its greatest crisis, the game has never looked more starkly like a cold, unfeeling business. Strip away the football and its incumbent rituals and thrills, take down the nets and lock the turnstiles, and professional sport reveals itself as nothing so much as two black and white, dispassionate columns of figures; money in, money out, football’s vulnerable bones exposed.
We can only speculate for now as lớn what might be the total financial cost lớn clubs, their staff, broadcasters, journalists and scores more by the time the final bill is rung up at the end of the coronavirus shut-down. On Tuesday, Barnet of the National League announced it will make all non-football staff redundant after the league followed the example of the Premier League and EFL in suspending play. It is unthinkable that further casualties won’t follow- According to the soccer tip for today page!
Football, for now and for the rest of its mind-bendingly dystopian present, has become a business without a product. Its greatest asset, the unique social and commercial power to attract congregations of thousands for 38 weeks every year, is a phenomenon without equivalent: 76,000 in Manchester; 54,000 in Liverpool; 60,000 in North London. The power lớn mobilize disparate social groups en mass is unique lớn football.
Stadiums spend the vast majority of their lives standing empty. Now their emptiness has become harrowingly symbolic. Images of Villa Park and the Emirates, taken from behind red and white plastic tape or through the railings of padlocked gates, will form part of a gallery of vibrant, lived-in spaces reduced lớn cold vacuums that will come to define these difficult months.
Perhaps the most disturbing image of last week came from Spain, a low-angle shot from Valencia v Atalanta in the Champions League taken with the empty, raking terraces of the Mestalla rising up behind. One wonders how history will remember an artifact like this; as the eerie, foreboding calm before the storm? Or as an example of football’s hubris, the moment when on the cusp of a global crisis the game believed it was too grand to yield lớn the approaching human catastrophe.
Does the temporary end of football matter, outside of the tragic enforced dismantling of its business structures and the unpaid salaries and redundancies that will now follow? Is it not in poor taste lớn bemoan the lack of a weekend fixtures program, or to fret over how the authorities will rule on Premier League relegation or whether or not the Champions League might be finished, when for many this extended moment of crisis will have a life-changing impact that will last for years?
Part of the answer is yes, since much of the game’s ability lớn recover as an industry depends on satisfactory solutions being found to the suspension of competition. TV companies have contracts with the domestic leagues and with Uefa that must be honoured. It is not enough to simply call for a moratorium, a pause that becomes a deletion – the shockwaves will rip right through the labour force if games are not broadcast, meaning advertising revenues are jeopardized, meaning subscriptions are torn up or made null. The human cost mounts the length of the causal chain.
Those peculiar evenings last week when a handful of European games played in empty grounds sparked dispute among fans about the ethics of playing matches without supporters. Most, maybe rightly, believed there was little point, that football played in silent stadiums is not really football at all, and that the authorities should suspend their competitions entirely rather than play on meaninglessly in echoing, empty bowls.
Now, the realization is dawning that the implications of failing lớn finish the season go far beyond the existential. Football is in crisis. We can no longer afford to luxuriate over the philosophical meaning of a goal scored to a silent cheer
0 Bình luận
Bình luận