What Next If The Season Gets Voided?

Callum Hudson-Odoi, Marouane Fellaini, Mikael Arteta and Pablo Dybala have all seemingly contracted and recovered from coronavirus without any reported repercussions. Those who have contracted it in the Bundesliga will no doubt be monitored as well. A small percentage of those that recover may have reduced lung capacity initially, but it's not clear if this is a long-term effect and again chances are it'd be more likely to be the case amongst older patients that have had more severe symptoms.

Plus, further to the chances of dying in a car accident referenced above, the additional chances for suffering an injury that would be career ending to a footballer are not included in those stats either.

 

Please stop giving TVoR more ideas.

 

My preference is robots on horses. But I feel it's drifting.

 

Makes you wonder why they banned footy originally.

Let the fans in NOW

 

This is what worries me in that it is likely to be the Government line. In general the Government, of course don’t understand football or football fans. They just want their votes. So they will be behind restarting the PL if at all possible because the most people watch it. The rest of football can go hang. Playing behind closed doors doesn’t matter to them either because the nation will be so delighted to have football back and most of the money comes from TV anyway.
As a footnote I understand the BBC are televising the restarting Korean league (behind closed doors). Are we that desperate?

 

But it’s still not a relevant comparison - it’s one that Donald Trump has peddled even, unsurprisingly. The virus can spread exponentially, car crashes can’t. The R rating of this virus is below 1 but has been as high as 3 and could well be again if things happen too soon - a point literally stated by many people far more knowledgeable than you or I. It’s a virus which already seems to have various strains and it’s ability to mutate are not yet known fully - in fact, not enough is known about it yet full stop. Can car crashes mutate? Do car crashes have an R rating? I accept you statistic of it being more or just as likely to die in a car crash. But their are far more nuances to it than that, some of which I’ve laid out likely many more that I haven’t, and I do believe you know that. You are just ignoring them to back up your opinion. That’s how I think you’re being wilfully disingenuous- because you are failing to even acknowledge the opposite opinion to yours, and rather just would say anyone who holds such an opinion is needlessly negative, rather than being more credible and saying it’s caution, rather than negativity.

I still haven’t seen you give any suggestions for what should happen if a player contracts the virus once things are under way? Given the contact tracing etc and the need for anyone who has had contact with them to self isolate too. This week alone, 3 Cologne players, 4 Sampdoria players and 6 Fiorentina staff (3 players, 3 back room staff) have tested positive.

How and why should the game start when you will likely have uneven squads throughout the PL at various points?

 

Surely the R0 of the virus is specific to the environment and location and has no relevance to footballers under project restart? The footballers will be in an artificial bubble protected from it as much as possible? They’ll have twice weekly testing so anyone who does get it will be found and isolated. They said on the news this morning that the R0 in London is now 0.5, but in care homes is a lot higher. Neither will be relevant to football restarting under certain conditions. The R0 is different for different locations.

One constant that isn’t affected by that is the mortality rate, which for under 30s is 0.03%, but that’s only as accurate as the amount of tests that have been carried out. With the case in France from December meaning the amount of asymptomatic cases will be both significantly higher and skewed towards younger people, that figure could easily be 0.003%.

 

So in this scenario if the PL tells the FA the clubs have voted for no relegation the FA should just rubber stamp it then?

 

I could not agree with you more davisp2, we all know it is ALL ABOUT THE MONEY. The powers that be in football don't give a **** about the players or their families, to them money is more important than their lives.

Furthermore as someone said earlier although it is very unlikely that young fit footballers would die if they contracted C19, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that as C19 is respiratory disease it could have a permanent effect on a players lung capacity and they might never get back to being the player they were before having the disease even if they only had a relatively mild case of it.

Therefore, even if C19 did not actually kill them, it could still kill off their careers as footballers.

 

The PL will throw money at the problem, and increase the parachute payment for this season to get the bottom 6 to fall in line

 

How is not "a relevant comparison"? Just because Trump said something doesn't automatically make it right or wrong. Car accidents are not contagious, yet they still result in such a high number of incidents. Chlamydia can be pretty contagious in certain circumstances, but it isn't very deadly. Bullets aren't contagious, yet they'd have a higher mortality rate than the coronavirus. Ultimately, the data is the data.

However the virus is capable of spreading, we already have decent numbers on it, and it seems highly unlikely that footballers in a very controlled environment with regular testing will have more risk of dying from it than the average member of the population has already had over the last 2 months. a19tgg's post above explains this in a bit more detail as well.

I've shown more flexibility in my thoughts and arguments than those that have been literally only willing to countenance those involving ending the season.

For instance, as I've already pointed out on a number of occasions now, if the NHS deems that the burden on the health service from the PL restarting will be too much, then the season will need to be voided; how is that not acknowledging different sides to the argument?

I already said that I don't know that. Surely I can't be expected to know every single detail about the plan to restart, otherwise I'd be writing the PL's proposal for them! I'm sure the Bundesliga and K-League amongst others have given the matter some thought before deciding to go ahead.

 

Why would footballers be questioning the logic of playing in this scenario? Surely it's not just laziness? Them being thick as pigsh*t?

All that needs to happen is the club doctors tell the players they are fine and they only have a 0.03% chance of dying of coronavirus if they play. But hang on, the club doctors don't understand this either? Are they thick and/or lazy as well?

 

My post was simply in relation to the discussion on risk, and that the R0 is a controllable number, hence it doesn’t really have a relevance with regards to the risk to footballers, because the whole point is they will be controlling the environment they play in. So when calculating the risk vs a dying in a car accident the R0 is irrelevant to the calculation. The mortality rate is the mortality rate, it is what it is. I’m not saying footballers should put up with this, that’s their call, but simply that it is possible to make fair and reasonable comparisons to other risks that we face on a daily basis. The R0 doesn’t skew this because footballers will be playing in an environment where the R0 is virtually, if not zero.

 

jumpers for goal posts

 

Er yes it is mate!

 

I wouldn't be surprised

 

Btw, you've now got your answer with Dynamo Dresden's entire squad being put in to quarantine. However, the Bundesliga is continuing regardless:

https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...blow-dynamo-dresden-team-quarantined-covid-19

 

It's not impossible, tens-hundreds of £millions are potentially at stake for BHA.

People not too infrequently fake illness to cover for a hangover to miss a day of work, or fake illness to get an extension for some school coursework they've not yet finished, and those are things with lower stakes than this.

 

I wonder if everyone is faking coronavirus and it was a joke that got out of hand to see if we could all work from home for a few days lol

 

Absolutely not

 

I would say it’s close to impossible. These things will have to be monitored as best as possible, the results of the test will have to be logged and probably audited somewhere.

Faking a test and a positive result would be beyond the pale. I’m fairly sure the clubs know this.

 

Madness.

 

If/when the official restart is underway then yes that likely will be the case, but at the moment I don't think anyone will be checking them.

 

I disagree but neither of us know in truth.

 

My footballing concern is still that they re-start the PL, Villa win a game and go above us and then there is a second spike + lockdown and then the season gets decided on status quo / PPG we get relegated.

 

I’m not sure how much I agree with that. I completely get where they’re coming from, but if they’re relegated then ultimately what difference does it make to them? If anything it will make it harder for them next season if nobody leaves the championship but three teams come down. It’s seems that’s coming from a place of having won promotion themselves 12 months ago, so they feel especially hard done by for a team not having done the same.

 

Good for them. Anything that keeps Weeds in their place as a small time championship club of bottlejobs should be supported.

 

But that seems to be saying if they get relegated after playing the games they don’t want anybody promoted if they haven’t. That’s different to trying to get relegation scrapped altogether. Don’t get me wrong I’d love it if it happened and that denied Leeds, but it does seem a little bit spiteful to be relegated fairly but insist that nobody takes your place.

 

Thinking about it a bit more there perhaps is a scenario there they have a case. It’s still not clear how the FA’s veto works (on the basis it’s regarding rule changes, so I still don’t get how this affects voiding a season) But on the basis they insist on relegation and promotion and they can enforce it, if every effort is made to get the PL up and running, there may then be no real inclination to get the championship finished.

That wouldn’t really be very fair, let the PL do all the heavy lifting safe in the knowledge that they don’t have to.