It's Coming Back

GET AWAY FROM ME

Turns out we were mega-prescient, as usual, and were only a couple of days ahead of the government in declaring coronavirus to be completely over and looking forward to football coming home back now we can all just do whatever the hell we want without consequence.

With the Bundesliga providing a welcome distraction from rolling coverage of a balloon with a hay wig and no spine – not necessarily a surprise, given that it’s a balloon, covered in hay – it’s been cautiously mentioned that the Premier League may make a return sometime around the middle of June. A resumption of contact training has today been given the green light, praise be. Regular testing will become a feature as games return behind closed doors, so goes the plan.

So far so good. But the Government also hinted that at the end of June, in England at least, five-aside football may also return, which raises a few questions and more eyebrows, given the massive care being taken to protect professional footballers for presumably the duration of the remainder of the season, however long that ends up being, and possibly beyond.

Now, five-aside football doesn’t overly bother us, possibly because it’s been a good couple of years now since either of us were in any danger of getting nearer than 2 metres to anyone on a football pitch. But there does seem to be something of a discrepancy between the way the Government, who we know love a ‘one rule for some, another rule for everyone else’, have outlined this, particularly given the alacrity with which Premier League clubs and those in the EFL contemplating playoffs, have made testing a priority. They employ doctors, too, while we can only assume that ‘Inter Yer Nan’ and ‘Fred West Ham’ do not.

So what to do? Amateur football for 11-aside club teams, or at least those that are FA-affiliated, is cancelled until the regular resumption of leagues as would normally happen in August/September. But there will be thousands of us returning to our local leagues the minute that we’re able to. And we don’t know about you, but we’d feel far more at risk of coronavirus when Sweaty Barry from the Horse and Jockey shoulder barges us in the face en route to hoofing our ball onto the railway than if we lost a header to Mats Hummels.

Handshakes, hand sanitiser, face masks may allow the Government to mount the ‘common sense’ defence, but as you’ll know if you’ve ever been on a football pitch, you check your common sense at the gate that refuses to close on the way in.

And fair enough, this is perhaps a little sensational (us?!). Exercise is literally the only thing we’ve been allowed to do for the last couple of months and living healthily is a pretty good defence against most stuff, so received wisdom goes. So people-wise, maybe we can live with it.

There is another consideration though and that’s whether or not we’ll have quite as many options to go back to. Providers of five-aside facilities will have been hit by the same considerations as many others – in fact, even before the lockdown came into effect, Powerleague was requesting cash from its customers to keep it in business. What’s more, this was only a year or so after it closed 13 sites, costing 109 jobs, in order to stay afloat. Before that, according to the BBC it had 50 sites across the UK and Ireland, and employed over 580 people. Falling revenues for the three years prior to the closures can only have exacerbated the ‘no revenues at all’ the company’s had since March and we can only speculate what that has meant for the remainder of the 580 staff in the meantime.

They’re not the only provider to be struggling. The Goals Soccer Group was, to put it delicately, in the shit to the tune of £13m, although this one was due to an accounting scandal (*Googles Goals, sees part-owned by Mike Ashley, shuts browser*) but having delisted was bought by Soccerworld at the end of 2019. Complete closure for a good portion of 2020 may also affect how they are able to look after their 750 staff.

Perhaps more desperate to get back than most, Powerleague reopened some sites on 22 May, offering ‘Home games’ (for you and your housemates, should you have any), ‘Family games’ (for you and your family, should you have any), and ‘1-aside challenges’ (for you and a mate, should you be completely fucking nuts). They’ll be sanitising balls between sessions (presumably they mean footballs, although maybe that’s an intriguing money-raising strategy they have come up with during lockdown) and the whole idea seems like a perfectly reasonable way to get the pitches open and things up and running again.

The question is how long ‘making do’ can really last. Some facilities that were already struggling are in renewed difficulty given vandals/bored people have been either trying to access closed facilities or succeeding and for reasons best known to themselves, cutting up the pitches and fucking off with them. And the last thing any of us really need right now is entitled pricks thinking they are above the law.

Like everything else there will be a price to pay for the interruptions to normality and a lot of it won’t become clear until we have a stab at normality ourselves. But a bit like pubs – and if there’s one thing we know about other than football, it’s pubs – some might survive, but it looks like it’ll be a lot of feeling our way back into it before they can flourish … very much like us in five-aside. Hopefully by then it’s not too late.