Hooray, the last four participants in the European Football Championship next summer have been determined: Hungary, Scotland, North Macedonia and Slovakia. The field of participants is complete, the tournament can come! Or not?
When you hear news like that of Domagoj Vida, the captain of the Croatian national team, who found out about his corona infection during a friendship kick this week, was replaced and isolated at halftime, whereupon the colleagues then set off without him to next kick in Sweden – then one would have to doubt whether international football is heading for the big Corona crash rather than a tournament in twelve countries between Baku and Bilbao.
While in spring many football locations in Europe were still proud to have revived games with hygiene concepts, which were largely free of coronavirus for a long time, the number of infections in professional sport has long since risen into adventurous spheres: If you were to see the six positive cases in the TSG’s 30-man squad Extrapolating Hoffenheim according to the Robert Koch Institute School, the incidence value would be 20,000 new infections per 100,000 cabin occupants. Not even the Berchtesgadener Land can do that.
Still, nobody has to shake the European Football Championship. Perhaps by June 2021 all professionals will have been vaccinated long ago; in any case, the warm weather returns. And how to get in Bubbles moving, i.e. in bubbles sealed off from the public, from team quarters to stadiums, from private buses to private planes – this is what professional sport has long since perfected. It worked as smoothly at the final series of the US basketball league NBA in Florida as it did at the Champions League final tournament in Lisbon, which FC Bayern won. (It wasn’t until a few players from the final opponent Paris Saint-Germain jetted to Ibiza to relax afterwards that the virus was there again.)
It is possible that Uefa will have to host their European Championship tournament in empty or half-full stadiums, or it may not work in twelve countries. But there will be enough players who tested negative, the TV billions will flow, the big goal is not up for discussion. The question is rather what damage will still arise on the way there.
It is rather unlikely that sport will get through the winter with the Domagoj Vida method: If you are positive, you pause, everyone else just takes the next test, jets to the next game – and when the next round of results comes in, you keep looking who to get off the field.
How fragile the structure is can be seen in handball in particular: the league operations started pleasantly smoothly, six game days without positive cases – but because the players then set off for the rally, each to his national team and with them across the Corona continent , everything is now in question. The progress of the Bundesliga. The World Cup planned for January in Egypt.
But it’s the same in many sports: the league has to work so that the clubs survive, the associations, in turn, need international matches and the European Cup. It is a cycle that is lucrative on the one hand, and ruinous on the other, from which there was no escape even before the pandemic. Except that the players came back with broken ankles or ligaments. Now they bring the virus with them. Nevertheless, there are only drawbacks in the throat, not in the game plan. And at some point you may come to an ungracious verdict: The sport has provoked its own lockdown. It is impossible to continue playing – because of a lot of gambling.
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