Is football as we know it doomed?

the Huddersfield owner thinks it might be:

As it is yes, but it will survive. Players used to play for a “bit more” money than average Joe before it all went crazy. There are loads of kids that will still want to be professional footballers and loads of current pros that would struggle to earn 10% of what they earn now doing something else.

Lower league clubs may need to become semi professional but so be it. Plenty others going to be struggling for a while after this.

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Be interesting to see if the Premier league deal goes west. That’ll change things.

Read the article.I keep seeing this we can’t do this “until a vaccine is available” line.

I think people need to go back to the issue of suspension of human rights, and in this case the right to assemble and associate, the current suspension of which we will come to the end of in just under a month’s time. When that expiry occurs it will be entirely incumbant upon the government to justify any extension, and they will have to be explicit in explaining their justification based on the facts. When the Coronavirus Act was put in place there was a huge amount of uncertainty, and very little established science, we went into lockdown on the back of this. That won’t be the case in a month’s time, so this is where we all really need to pay attention to what happens.

There are some situations where a public authority can restrict your rights to freedom of assembly and association.

This is only the case where the authority can show that its action is lawful, necessary and proportionate in order to:

  • protect national security or public safety*
  • prevent disorder or crime*
  • protect health or morals, or*
  • protect the rights and freedoms of other people.*
    Action is ‘proportionate’ when it is appropriate and no more than necessary to address the issue concerned.

You may face a wider range of restrictions if you work for the armed forces, the police or the Civil Service.

The point in bold is key. If we have a virus that is deadly to say 0.3-0.5 percent of those infected, and the overwhelming majority of that number (I think it was 91% last time I looked) have significant co morbidities, then the “waiting for a vaccine” justification for suspending the human rights of the entire popuation is nonsensical, and completely unjustified.

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Agree in principle but not sure about stats. We have had 36k deaths out of 260k cases. That’s a good bit more than 0.3 to 0.5 %.

Ergh it’s going to turn political.

Getting back to the point, about the football, I wouldn’t say it’s doomed but it’s going to take a while to recover. I don’t know how any non league club is surviving to be honest. I think the EFL will be protected but I fear for those further down. Imagine no football with fans until say, September/October earliest (I think it’ll be January myself), how are these clubs supposed to keep going?
Liam McDonald has put a really good squad together at Rushall, it’ll be a shame if all that starts to fall apart through no fault of their own.

We’ll obviously see a few more kids in teams. Maybe a few more punts on players from much lower down the pyramid, cheap risks. Clubs will be more patient with managers, patient with players, maybe those things are needed?

So it won’t be doomed but I think it’ll be different, some of it for the good of the game too. It was all getting out of hand, this reality check should tighten the purse strings and remind every owner that football isn’t immune from going bump over night.

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Football will be doomed if we don’t get playing in front of fans by October but so will the rest of the economy. Whilst not going all the way with GEORDIE it is clear we are going to have to live with this virus . It ain’t going away and the sooner we recognise that and get on with living the better.

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I think the game at top level needs to “die” or at least be significantly damaged. It’s morally bankrupt with little sense of reality or decency. I shall happily dance on its grave.
Sadly, most of the casualties will be at our level I expect.

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Really sad for clubs lower down the pyramid, especially those who have managed to put a good team together as Rushall have. I was thinking about Boldmere St Michaels the other day, they invested big on 3G pitches and built a model based around renting them out 7 days a week all year round. Then that income just gets wiped out, devastating.

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But aren’t those pitches the ones that caused Covid 19 in the first place? :astonished:

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3G, beg my pardon!

If anything, the premier league may throttle any money travelling down the leagues such as solidarity payments as the attempt to stem their own losses. B teams and feeder clubs ldeas will appear again under the guise of ensuring lower league football ‘survives’ although in reality a local club will become a franchise of some premier outfit.

Professional players at lower levels will need to come to terms with wages not been as they once were for some time, and agents especially will need to back off.

For a few clubs unfortunately, the ownership may decide that their main asset is more financially viable as something rather than a home of a football club. I hope not but there are some predatory bastards out there.

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But quite simply no we havn’t. The results of the antibody tests that were released last week showed that “at some point in the last few weeks” as Hancock didn’t give us all the information we needed, 1.5 million people had been infected in London alone. Because he didn’t give us the dates we can’t extrapolate how many would now have been infected, clearly more, but how many more given that 1) time has moved on 2) it takes two weeks for an individual to produce detectable antibodies, and 3) Not everyone infected produces detectable antibodies. Worst case scenario in London was an IFR of 0.65 percent, but taking into account factors 1-3 its clearly lower than that, but how much lower? This is what we need to know before we allow our human rights to be further suspended, and the govenrment should be nailed to the wall by the media in respect of scrutinising that decision…but of course they won’t be, because the media are useless, so its down to us.

Going back to the original article on this thread, ie the Vaccine or Lockdown binary choice, nobody ever mentions effective therapeutic treatment. Several readilly available drugs are currently undergoing clinical trials, if just one of them proves even reasonably effective in reducing the minority of serious cases and fatality still further then that should quite simply be that.

Really?

Can see most of next season being BCD, really hope not though. September-October for some fans to be let back in would be pretty good and is still has a small chance of happening.

Perhaps some vitriol will be taken out of the game once fans get back in given we’ve seen how easily it can get taken away. Not talking about chants but more players getting abused when they want to move on. Not just at the top level but Cook and Leahy got dogs abuse on social media when they moved on.

My nephew started back training there on saturday, by the look of the new changing rooms and showers they have just invested in, everything looks more than fine :wink:

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Ok. Don’t want to veer away from the main topic.Clearly your stats reflect knowledge I was not aware of.

I agree that it will be mainly our level (Leagues 1 & 2 plus top division of the National League) that will be hit hardest. Most of the moneybags in the EPL and Championship will be able to ride it out until the TV £billions starts flowing again (though I expect squad sizes and player salaries outside of those clubs with European involvement and/or bottomless-pocket sugar daddy owners will be cut), and the part-timers and amateurs lower down the pyramid (for whom players’ wages and crowd sizes are less of an issue) will mainly survive on a shoestring or be able to fold and reform to start again more easily.

For those in the middle though, in-ground spectators and associated sales are the main income and without that many will go to the wall (especially if, like the Burys and Macclesfields of this world, they have been over committing themselves trying to climb the greasy pole).

I think others have already commented that there might be a cascade effect of big earning EPL squad players dropping down a division of two for less pay (if sense does reign and the clubs pull back a bit numbers and salaries), and that could drive up standards for the clubs at our level that do survive, BUT there is also the possibility that instead the big clubs instead look to expand the loan system so that we in effect just become cub sides for their reserves (and be thankful for it!)

I think if the government give the Premier League permission to play in June it should be part of the deal that substantial sums are ploughed into the lower divisions.

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Sadly that’s a pipe dream! Despite the rhetoric, outside the Greed League, no club matters in the slightest. Follow the money is all that matters to them.

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