On Friday the Premier League and the rest of English soccer — the Championship and lower leagues — suspended their seasons until at least April due to the outbreak of COVID-19, a strain of the coronavirus.
It was a late-made decision — as of Thursday night, the leagues had all plans to move forward with games this weekend as regularly scheduled. It was only after news broke that Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta had tested positive for COVID-19, and Chelsea player Callum Hudson-Odoi had as well, that the team owners held an emergency meeting on Friday morning and made the decision.
I am glad the Premier League got there and did the right thing. I am worried they got there for the wrong reasons.
Too often we are seeing professional sports leagues only act when one of their own contracts the disease. It is only then that the point is driven home. While the NBA acted more quickly than other leagues in the United States, and was the first domino to fall in a sense, it was only when Rudy Gobert tested positive that the league made the decision.
Twenty thousand plus people in stadiums across the country, packed in during a pandemic, with no way of knowing who is sick or not? Not an issue. One center for the Utah Jazz? League suspended.
The same has happened in the Premier League now, which seemed more than content to hold games … until the Arsenal manager and a Chelsea player got sick. Now every league in English soccer is off.
This is how too many of us think, I fear. A pandemic is an abstraction until it hits someone you know, at which point it becomes very, very real. By waiting until one of their own tested positive, these leagues are making clear they don’t really care about general public health, or if they do care, they are willing to risk it. But when a member of their tribe comes down with it, then it becomes something to react to.
I can understand the hesitance, but Premier League officials needed to understand what a cavalier attitude about this disease can bring. While coronavirus has not rocked the UK yet, it is currently doing so in northern Italy, where the pandemic has led to a nightmarish, post-apocalyptic scenario which medical professionals are describing using war-time metaphors. There is a shortage of hospital beds. People are getting sick, and dying.
Interview after interview with Italians has them saying: We just thought it was the flu. We didn’t take it seriously.
Thankfully, these leagues are now taking this seriously. With the Premier League, it took a positive test for Arteta, who we all pray recovers quickly from this disease. And in a perverse way, Arteta’s positive test could end up doing a lot of good, in that it woke the Premier League up to the real threat here.
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