Unvaccinated Premier League players are harming their own careers as managers lose patience with jab rates

At an England media day at St George’s Park last October, the scene verged on farcical. Assembled members of the press pack had a remit to ask questions about vaccination statuses and understandably wanted to do so.

NHS England, scientists and Government were urging for a greater take-up rate to fight Covid-19 variants and Premier League footballers hold cultural sway with the young.

And the players had equal right to bat those questions straight back: “Not for me to say”; “I don’t want to mention my own status”; “I have made my decision”.

Only Tammy Abraham broke rank, an honesty that caught everyone in the room off guard. Cue your headlines: “Tammy Abraham: I got vaccinated because it is the right thing to do”.

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It turns out that all it took was for Premier League clubs to fly out on money-spinning tours to the US, Australia and Singapore for their vaccinations statuses to be implicitly revealed.

Crystal Palace flew without eight different players in the first-team squad. N’Golo Kante and Ruben Loftus-Cheek were missing for Chelsea, Phil Foden and John Stones for Manchester City. In most cases, absences were recorded as “entry requirements”.

We can all read between those lines. Singapore and the US do not allow entry for unvaccinated non-domestic citizens except in exceptional circumstances; playing a friendly game to expand your employer’s global marketing reach apparently does not qualify. Australia changed their rules on 6 July, but any visa requests for preseason entry will have been submitted months ago.

Footballers have had all the benefits of being vaccinated explained to them – they do not lack information. They have had the fear-mongering and conspiracy theories dismissed with evidence by experts. Their managers, often father figures to young players, have urged and urged until they can urge no more. Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola were two who did it publicly. Jurgen Klopp compared those who refuse the jab to drunk drivers. His ebullience was easier because Liverpool have almost a 100 per cent vaccination rate.

But to some, that message is clearly not getting through. Perhaps the problem is not insufficient information, but an overload of it. People in their 20s get their news and their advice from myriad sources. If the expertise of the source is not born equal, their delivery presents them as such. Social media excels in presenting dubious opinions as convincing facts and young professional footballers are a strong target market.

Add in religious and socio-cultural factors, an obsession with what goes into their bodies for fear of upsetting their equilibrium and a career in which you have an awful lot of free time to absorb online information, and those who chose not to be vaccinated have likely hardened their original stance. The point is this: if you haven’t persuaded a player to have a jab in the first 18 months, you’re unlikely to now.

This places managers in a difficult position. They oversee the place where personal autonomy (for getting the vaccine is, ultimately, a choice) meets professional responsibility and their loyalty is the club above the player. They also know discussing players individually would be to betray trust. The preseason tours, effectively splitting squads between the vaccinated and unvaccinated by inadvertently revealing their statuses, changes that.

Patience appears to be running out. Managers see preseason as the breeding ground for successful campaigns and they are unlikely to react well to anything that makes their life more difficult, particularly when the buck stops with them.

If you are forced to spend a fortnight 10,000 miles from home while several of your key players train with the Under-23s at home because they did not listen to your advice, you can understand why it might grate a touch.

A recent report in Football.London suggests that Tottenham will only consider signing vaccinated players. This week, Thomas Tuchel and Patrick Vieira both conceded that the vaccination status of players will be factored into discussions over transfer targets. This will become the norm, made public or otherwise. If two players are roughly equivalent but one is more at risk of symptomatic infection and long Covid, why would you not take the risk-averse option. As cases rise towards winter, and international travel continues to increase, it becomes more relevant still.

We know how this will be met by the vaccine sceptics and the anti-vaxxers. Some god-awful media personality will post some nonsense about mission creep and The Man’s irrevocable trampling of our liberties. The players who refuse to be vaccinated will be held up as freedom fighters and their opinions may be entrenched even further.

Will they change their minds – who knows; perhaps the stick beats the carrot as motivation and until now only the carrot has been used. Will managers relent on their preference for vaccinated players? Clearly not. It creates an ironic scenario: a refusal to be jabbed for fear of harming your career, a career harmed by your refusal to be jabbed.

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