It’s time to suspend the Premier League – only a firebreak will wrestle control of new Covid crisis

The Premier League is in the midst of a new wave of Covid-19 crisis. The evidence is anecdotal – Tottenham’s postponed match against Brighton last weekend caught us all a little off guard – and now statistical.

Between August 30 and November 21, Premier League clubs recorded 39 positive tests. Last week, they recorded 42. England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty told the country to expect record-breaking numbers of infections in the near future. The Premier League should expect the same.

The games played this midweek had a grimly familiar feel, and it isn’t just that Arsenal vs West Ham and Brighton vs Wolves were also fixtures in the final round of matches in March 2020 before English football was suspended. Each were played with the uncomfortable sense that none of this really mattered in the context of a public health crisis, 22 footballers each reaching for their stringed instruments and playing a familiar tune while the ship begins to sink below the water.

The Premier League has already written to its member clubs to tell them to take “emergency measures”, including an increase in the frequency of testing (which is one explanation for the rise in positive cases), observing social distancing and wearing masks indoors. Players and staff must now take lateral flow tests immediately before entering the training ground to try and limit the spread of confirmed cases.

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But it does all feel a little like whistling into the wind. Premier League clubs already had rigorous processes in place, but the reality of a variant that seems to be more transmissible is that football could never hope to maintain the structure of its bubble. When the UK is recording 78,610 cases in one day, no industry is airtight.

It leaves the Premier League with three possible options; inaction is not an option here. The first is to tell its clubs that they should grin and bear it, forcing Under-23 and Under-18 squads to train in isolation from the first team and telling them to use those academy players to make up the numbers.

The advantage of that approach is that it would ramp up the pressure on clubs to ensure that all of their players have received the vaccine. The obvious drawback – and it is a persuasive one – is that it threatens to punish those clubs who do have outbreaks and thus damages the sanctity of the league’s competition.

The second option would be to carry on as we are, but with far more clarity. There is an acceptance that matches will be called off on an ad hoc basis, but much of the current ill-feeling surrounds the lack of certainty about how many absences are required for a postponement to be enforced. Brendan Rodgers told the media that Leicester City have more players out than other clubs who have had games called off, but some of those are not Covid-19 related. Do we take that into account?

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Jurgen Klopp believes that this must be a two-way communication, with clubs announcing how many players have returned positive PCR tests and the league making public how many positive PCR tests makes a postponement an option for the club involved. That seems to make plenty of sense.

But even then, there are issues. On Wednesday, Watford’s game against Burnley was called off two-and-a-half hours before the match, with away supporters either already in the town or well on the way. The same occurred on Thursday, albeit with more notice given when Leicester’s game against Spurs was eventually called off seven hours before kick-off.

Despite the understandable outrage, there is little evidence that Watford could have done much more – they had no choice but to wait until the PCR tests were returned even if they were suspicious about the fixture’s viability. If we are to continue, we’re going to have to accept that supporters are going to get screwed over. What’s new?

Which leaves the third – and increasingly most logical – option. With Brentford’s game against Southampton, Crystal Palace’s trip to Watford and Manchester United’s home fixture against Brighton already likely to be postponed this weekend due to serious outbreaks, it makes more sense to call a firebreak to try and control the rise in cases. It need only last eight days, encompassing this weekend’s fixtures plus the EFL quarter-finals to be played next midweek. The Premier League could return on Boxing Day.

Burnley’s game against Watford was called off just two-and-a-half hours before kick-off (Photo: Getty)

But this too is beset by complications. If infections do indeed continue to rise, which seems inevitable, can you really restart the league when it has more positive cases than at the point you postponed it? And what happens after the restart when clubs continue to have small outbreaks? It also surely requires clubs to ask players to return to “bubbles”, as they did in 2020.

With a UEFA Nations League programme taking place next summer and next season’s schedule already being ludicrously tight (and starting early) because of next year’s winter World Cup, there is no option to extend this campaign. European competition decrees that space in the calendar is at a premium.

There’s also the issue of finances. You might argue that decisions over player and staff health should override such concerns – and morally you’d probably be right – but at the point that gameweeks become postponed it raises the prospect of rebates to broadcasters that clubs are understandably keen to avoid.

The firebreak makes sense. Brentford manager Thomas Frank is the first to publicly call for one and there’s little doubt other Premier League managers privately support his suggestion. But the league’s governing body must use that period to construct a detailed, documented plan that provides greater clarity to clubs and supporters over the management of Covid-affected fixtures. If we’ve learned anything from the last 20 months it’s that this problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

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