Serie A announced they are officially on hold until April 3. Curious how this is gonna work w/ the Champions League, the other domestic leagues and the Euro coming up.

None of that shit important when health is on the line.

CL is prolly gonna get canceled...Euro too.

They’ll play in empty stadiums.

The irony of Liverpool not getting to celebrate 30 years of frustration in front of fans is harsh.

The music is slowing down and six teams are circling the three remaining seats. Might be the only interesting thing remaining in the epl.

I'm going for Villa, mainly because we have a poster actually invested in them, and we need all the engagement we can get on this board.

Also Norwich, although that's not looking so good. I used to go to Kings Lynn for work a few years back, and a lot of the team lived in Norwich and rooted for the canaries.

Also Watford, I respect them, and they've been up consistently for a while. Get the impression if they go down they're not getting back immediately.

F'k West Ham. Meh on Bornmouth or Brighton.

We get grealish cheaper if they don’t.

Ffs we need points and he decides he’s prime Manuel Neuer.

Definitely hope Watford stays afloat.

Villa, because of John Terry.

>Villa, because of John Terry.

wasn't optimistic about our chances before but now... Mbappe is playing out of his mind these days, he's our only hope

bus not included

again

There are no goalies in soccer.

: )

For sure. There will be no EPL games behind closed doors. That's insane. And we don't know when he contracted the virus. The virus is undetectable in the beginning stages of the virus. He could have contracted this a week ago, and symptoms are now presenting themselves.

The entire Arsenal facility has been contaminated, and the hand shake with players, coaches, management, and fans.

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/coronavirus-callum-hudson-odoi-chelsea-latest-arteta-a9398981.html

but I just had to post about US Soccer rolling around in its own diarrhea, time and time again. this time, the publicized court filing against the USWNT that used every bad PR phrase possible and barely stopped short of calling women inherently stupid.

one argument presented was that the USMNT has to face more hostile crowds in the US due to Mexico's following, thus their jobs are more demanding. who really put that on fucking paper and thought that was a good idea? oh yeah, a lawyer working for US Soccer!

I'm in the group that feels that the US women should not be paid on equal footing as the men, due to how long the men have been playing, and that the field of competition is tougher

Men have been playing soccer since 1885. US Women's soccer started in 1985, and the team came into being a top top club in 1999.

Now I do believe that they deserve to be the highest paid women's national team in the world, but to be paid on the same level as the men, or higher, I disagree with that.

Their level of competition needs to get better. There are really only 4-5 truly competitive national teams in women's soccer, and there are barely 20 teams in the field, and most of them have terrible women's national programs, because their countries don't invest in women's soccer. United States invest an immense amount of money into the women's national team, probably more than any other country.

The men have to face stiff competition from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, so competition is far superior to anything the women are facing.

With that, I say, continue to grow the women's game, and as other countries catch up and provide better competition, then the earnings and prizes will increase. Women's national team is great simply because the majority of the teams are really, really bad.

Think about it, in this modern era of soccer, which I date starting in the 90s. I don't count anything before 1990 to be able to compare to the current speed or play of soccer. No Men's national team has repeated as World Cup winners. The US women just did it, by winning in 2015 and 2019.

I mean, for US Soccer it's completely real.

But what a rotten organization.

just pay them the same. yes they may not actually merit it given the difference of scope between the mens and womens game.

but god this is an easy layup. take the PR win. everybody knows they have the money to do it anyway.

Come on man. They beat Thailand 13-0 in the World Cup. It was an embarrassment to the game of soccer, and how competition is overly one sided.

Thailand does not invest anywhere near the amount of money they invest in the men.
So you can’t just pay them to pay them to not have publicity issue, etc

Imagine two people taking math. One taking arithmetic other taking calculus. The one taking arithmetic is passing easily, where the other is struggling. Would you say the arithmetic person is smarter or on the same footing as the calculus person?

I’m not trying to degrade the women at all. They are fantastic, and the USSF has handled this poorly, but to be paid equally as the men for beating up on poor competition, now that’s not fair.

Have City throw their match this weekend

LFC beats Everton.

LFC title. End the season.

Send apologies to all the people who get sick because we extended the season an extra week.

I think this is the most prudent course of action.

/s

>Have City throw their match this weekend
>
>LFC beats Everton.
>
>LFC title. End the season.
>
>Send apologies to all the people who get sick because we
>extended the season an extra week.
>
>I think this is the most prudent course of action.
>
>/s

everything postponed... until you get to the Liga MX. Do they really think they're OK to keep things BAU?

news at 11.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/mar/14/west-ham-karren-brady-calls-for-premier-league-cancellation-coronavirus

no promotion or relegation, but European allotment based on current standings. theyre 7th i think, fwiw.

1) Declare liverpool champs;
I do genuinely feel bad for longtime liverpool season ticket holders being deprived of the chance to properly celebrate, but c'est la vie.

2) Uphold City's CL ban starting next season, because the Emiratis obviously deserve that shit.

3) Leicester gets the 2nd CL slot, and unfortunately Chelsea the 3rd slot. There's def an argument against exempting Chelsea from the proposed playoff below, but I think overall they've done enough throughout the season to keep their slot.

4) Championship style playoffs for the last CL slot between United & Wolves, and the same for the Europa between Sheffield, Spurs and Arsenal. Maybe have Spurs v Arsenal @ Wembley for the right to go to Sheffield, along with United & Wolves in a neutral venue.

This is where it gets contentious, obviously. I wish there was a way to give the last 2 CL spots to Wolves and Sheffield, leaving Chelsea, United, Spurs & Arsenal to battle for the Europa league.

I certainly recognize that on current form, and frankly talent, United merits the last CL slot. But fuck the Glazers, and every United fan not from Manchester.

Moreover Sheffield has a game in hand, that if they had won would have put them a point up on United. So maybe Sheffield deserves to battle it out for the CL spot with United. Wolves are just a better side than Sheffield though, we all know this.

5) Relegate Norwich only, with a playoff between Leeds & West Brom for the 1 promotion slot. Everyone else in the relegation zone stays up.

This is where it's really tough, given the financial implications. I'd personally like to see Norwich, Brighton and especially the Hammers go down. I have a soft spot for Aston Villa (they're good fans) and I've grown accustomed to Bournemouth and Watford in the EPL. I've really nothing against Norwich or Brighton, but the former clearly isn't up to speed, and the latter really doesn't offer much of anything. And fuck West Ham.

Overall it's just too early to call how things would turn out in the bottom of the EPL and top of the championship, other than that Norwich is the worst in the EPL and Leeds and West Brom are the best in the Championship.

Anyway, I think they should condense the rest of the season to like 4 weeks, maybe 4-6 games. Do it either in May/June, assuming we get through this, or in August prior to a delayed start of a slightly shortened 2020-21.

No matter what they do, you can't cancel a season after 75% of the games were played and just pretend it never happened.

Boris' phrenology-adjacent garbage science may just kill us all.

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/european/francisco-garcia-death-coronavirus-malaga-spain-football-coach-leukaemia-a9404566.html

Had a preexisting condition, Leukemia

2009 Spain-US confed cup to occupy my morning

The greatest game in Men’s American soccer history.

Hard to watch though because of what happened to Charlie Davies later down the road.

Thanks for sharing.

clint Dempsey turning carlos puyol inside out

fuckin crazy lol

and yeah, the charlie davies glimpse was kinda sad. he had the whole world in front of him, and people lost a family member.

on a sports note, imagine him on the field instead of wondo v belgium in 2014 :/

>on a sports note, imagine him on the field instead of wondo v
>belgium in 2014 :/

the way kyle beckerman was deployed was genius, and when they left him out of that game they couldn't get forward

Belgium had trouble with Yedlin's speed late in the game, imagine 2 of them

However that game made Spain strong as fuck later on down the road.

They realized Torres was trash, after that they put in Villa and the rest is history

Anyone want to watch the 86 Mexico World Cup with me this weekend? All of it?

I was actually going to make a separate GD-ish post about world cups and the power of nostalgia and being great markers for our lives a Being every four years, etc.

Poor Sunderland. That is all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/sports/germany-soccer-coronavirus.html

Germany Prepares for Soccer’s Return

With players back practicing, the Bundesliga is set to become the first of Europe’s major leagues to return to action, with plans for spectator-free games starting in early May.

By Tariq Panja
April 8, 2020

Germany is ahead of the curve. While other European soccer leagues are engulfed in uncertainty and damaging pay disputes between clubs and player unions, in Germany there is order and a cleareyed strategy to restart its league, which like others around the world was brought to a halt by the coronavirus outbreak.

This week, all the clubs in the top two divisions — 1. Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga — returned to the practice field, observing local health protocols, but offering millions of soccer-starved supporters the surest sign yet that they will soon be able to watch the sport once again, and far earlier than fans in Europe’s other big leagues.

The Bundesliga’s chief executive, Christian Seifert, said in an interview that plans were being put in place for games to return at all 36 stadiums by the beginning of May, with the remaining nine games of the schedule to be completed by the end of June, a time when some of Europe’s other top leagues may not yet have returned from their hiatus. England’s Premier League, soccer’s richest domestic competition, is unlikely to return until July at the earliest.

But for all the optimism, it’s clear that one of the defining characteristics of German soccer’s popularity will be absent, and absent for a long time. Seifert said the usually packed stadiums — Germany has the highest average attendance figures in Europe — would be empty, as so-called ghost games are played out in cavernous arenas devoid of the usual carnival-like match-day atmosphere. Soccer will be a TV-only entertainment, and is likely to remain so until the end of the year, Seifert said.

Germany’s return to the field will be watched closely. All European soccer has been halted, with the strange exception of Belarus. FIFA is allowing an indefinite extension to let leagues around the world complete their stopped-in-time seasons.

“We are part of the culture in the country, people long to get back a short piece of normal life, and that could mean the Bundesliga plays again,” Seifert said. “This is why we have to play our role here, and that means to support the government and to talk with the government about when we will be able to play again.”

Germany has not been immune from the ravages of Covid-19. The country has the fourth highest number of recorded cases in Europe, with more than 107,000 by Wednesday morning, according to Johns Hopkins University. But its health care system has so far managed to cope with the crisis perhaps better than anywhere else in the world, with a death rate from the disease lower than even South Korea, a model for flattening the curve.

The Bundesliga, Seifert said, is conscious of not being seen to add to the burden on the health care system. Germany’s testing regimen, by far the best in Europe, means that supplies needed for medical staff will not be diverted so soccer stars can get on the field.

“It won’t be the case that one doctor or one nurse that is really relevant for the system cannot be tested because football players have to be tested,” Seifert said.

In working out a plan, the Bundesliga estimates that 240 people, including players, coaching and medical staff, match officials and production staff will be needed for each game. Two groups have been set up to deal with the practicalities of staging the game: one to set up uniform game day regulations and the other, perhaps more important, to devise a hygiene plan for training and games and to work out what measures to take if a player tests positive.

“The concept is to give certainty to players, to their families and to society as well,” Seifert said.

The virus has created havoc with the global soccer calendar. Europe and South America’s national team championships have been postponed by a year to allow domestic seasons extra time to finish. Seifert said finishing the German season as early as possible would also benefit UEFA’s efforts to complete its two competitions, the Champions League and the Europa League. Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, said recently that those tournaments could not take place beyond August. The club season had been set to end in June.

“The sooner we are finished, the more flexibility we can provide to the European football landscape,” Seifert said.

The rush to return to the field is also borne of a financial necessity as much as an emotional one.

While its clubs are some of the healthiest in Europe, not finishing the season would lead to an enormous cost. Seifert put the figure at as much as 750 million euros, or about $816.5 million, a figure that compares to forecasts of one billion euros of losses in Spain’s top division, La Liga, and a minimum of one billion pounds, or about $1.24 billion, for the Premier League.

“For the moment, we are all fighting to survive,” said Seifert, predicting that 50 percent of the second-division teams were “very much in danger to file for bankruptcy,” if the season were canceled, while as many as five top-division teams would face serious problems, too.

Top-tier teams are certain to lose nearly 100 million euros from the absence of supporters, while the final, 300-million-euro installment has yet to be paid by domestic rights owners, the biggest of which is Comcast-owned Sky.

“We are in very constructive talks with all our partners no matter if it’s pay TV or free TV,” said Seifert, acknowledging the crisis has hurt television companies’ bottom lines as much as it has the soccer industry. He has made plans for a possible shortfall, which includes the possibility of taking a nine-figure bridging loan from private equity firms, like KKR and Apollo Global Management, which initiated talks. Seifert said he had hired an international bank to deal with those inquiries.

German clubs have largely not attracted big-money investors in the same way as the Premier League, where foreign billionaires and oil-rich sheikhs have poured money into the clubs. That’s largely because of a model that prevents commercial interests from owning more than 49 percent of a club. The crisis has led to suggestions that the regulation — one that is defended fiercely by fans but has long frustrated some club managers — may finally be about to be lifted. Seifert denied that was the case. “As long as I’m C.E.O. of Bundesliga, no one would discuss the 50+1 rule right in the middle of the coronavirus,” he said.

German clubs have managed to navigate the tricky issue of negotiating cuts to player salaries serenely, unlike in England where an ugly dispute among players, their union and teams has entered a second week. In Germany, where players and clubs negotiated directly, players at the biggest clubs have agreed to reduce their salaries by 20 percent to 30 percent and those at smaller ones by 10 percent. “To be honest, I didn’t understand the discussions in other countries because from the very beginning clubs were talking with their players about it,” Seifert said.

Seifert predicted that whatever the outcome of the next few months, one thing was for sure: The global $7 billion player transfer market is certain to collapse. Such a situation would have massive reverberations across the industry, particularly at clubs with risky business models geared to transfer market returns.

“In the short term, I would say the transfer market this summer will not exist, it will collapse,” he said. “Some agents will suddenly understand that they will have to work hard, or at least work; some leagues will understand that money is nothing that is coming automatically every month from heaven.”

these leagues, teams and corporations in general first priority is to get the train back rolling. any benefit to the public is a fortunate side effect.

all these people at every level of every club want to do what they do

they know the risks, and if all of their protocols are sound for keeping everyone apart from the general public, i say go for it. anyone who doesnt want to play or work the games should be allowed the opportunity to bow out without repercussions, but otherwise yeah.

Unless every single person you referred to is in some kind of total isolation unit out in the middle of the desert, which you can be certain they are not, you are putting other people's lives at risk.

House staff. Someone's grandparent living with them. Hell at some point a player would die from it.

Trust me, as a Liverpool fan there's no daily activity I'm more anxious for than leagues restarting so we can get our title.

But doing it already is irresponsible and just stupid. Even in Germany which had a pretty robust response to this crisis.

This article was incredibly short on detail on how exactly the "240 people per game" are going to be isolated.

It referenced testing, but testing doesn't prevent infection. Testing is reactive, not proactive.

This is how Italy and Spain became huge hot spots, because a la liga team and serie A team played against each other. It was at that game where the outbreak started for both countries.


However, since the game will be absent of fans, maybe it will be different.

I pose this question: if it is not safe for fans, how could it be safe for players? Americans sports leagues and owners will be monitoring closely. You know they will.

fans being there, and then more importantly dispersing back to where they came from, creates a public health issue for everyone.

240 people tested and sequestered in a hotel for weeks on end can be a closed system

To do the 14 day total isolation of every individual requires so many prerequisites and resources not yet available that I don't see how it could happen. And even if it does, if there's one small break in contamination, you'd have to shut the whole thing down again, and start the 14 day total isolation process all over again - for everyone. Players, trainers, cleaners, bus drivers, food delivery people. Everyone would have to do it all over again.

https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/04/10/sports-arent-coming-back-soon


Bursting the Bubble: Why Sports Aren't Coming Back Soon

The NBA, NFL and MLB are dreaming up ways to play amid a pandemic, with talk of isolating players in Arizona or Las Vegas or maybe on the moon. It all sounds great, until you talk to people who actually know science.
STEPHANIE APSTEIN
APR 10, 2020

The proposals multiply almost as fast as the coronavirus: The NHL can play in North Dakota! The NBA can play on a cruise ship! MLB can play in a biodome! The NFL can play in its stadiums, with 70,000 fans packed in!

These are fun thought experiments, at least as good a way to spend time in isolation as watching Tiger King. And everyone wants to believe we will be buying peanuts and Cracker Jack this summer. But fans deserve a reality check: According to the experts—medical experts, not the money-making experts in league offices—we will not have sports any time soon. And when we do, we will not attend the games.

Most of these ideas are essentially the same: The players live in quarantine, shuttling from the hotel to the stadium, for the duration of the season. They undergo daily COVID-19 tests. They bring joy to a terrified country. That seems reasonable on the surface. But look closer.

First, let’s do away with the suggestion, put forth by President Donald Trump, that football season could go on as normal, beginning on time in September and unfolding in front of crowded stadiums.

"We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine," says Zach Binney, a PhD in epidemiology who wrote his dissertation on injuries in the NFL and now teaches at Emory. Barring a medical miracle, the process of developing and widely distributing a vaccine is likely to take 12 to 18 months.

Image from iOS
Photo Illustration by Cameron Chatt

Until the vast majority of the population is immune to COVID-19, the disease the virus causes, any gathering as large as an NFL game risks setting off a biological bomb. That may sound like hyperbole, but that's the exact phrase a doctor in Bergamo, Italy’s hardest hit city, used to describe a Feb. 19 soccer match between hometown Atalanta and Spain’s Valencia, which super-charged the virus’s spread.

O.K., but what about empty stadiums?

“The idea of a quarantined sports league that can still go on sounds really good in theory,” says Binney. “But it’s a lot harder to pull off in practice than most people appreciate.”

Conversations with experts painted a picture of what exactly it would take to make these sports vacuums a reality. Before any of this can begin, every person who would have access to the facilities will need to be isolated separately for two weeks to ensure that no infection could enter. That’s players and coaches, athletic trainers and interpreters, reporters and broadcasters, plus housekeeping and security personnel. No one can come in or out. Food will have to be delivered. Hotel and stadium employees will have to be paid enough to compensate for their time away from their families. Everyone onsite will have to be tested multiple times during this initial period.

That brings us to the question of testing. At the moment, screening is scarce enough that many healthcare facilities cannot even clear their employees. Asymptomatic professional athletes are not high on anyone’s priority list. But here Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington, offers some hope. Testing is not technologically difficult, he says. There are supply chain issues—we will eventually run out of the long Q-tips required for the nasopharyngeal swab, for example—and questions of bureaucracy, but he is cautiously optimistic that we might have ubiquitous COVID-19 testing by the end of May.

All right, so the 14-day period is over and everyone has tested negative at least twice. Now they are allowed to begin spending time around one another—but not too much time. If one person gets it, he or she will begin spreading it immediately, so everyone will have to continue practicing social distancing. That probably means using a new ball for each play. It probably means seating players in stands rather than on benches or in dugouts. It certainly means banning high-fives.

All personnel must continue to be tested daily. We will be unlikely to have enough rapid testing by then, so they will probably have to settle for the tests that take several hours to produce results. That means the testing will probably run a day behind.

Any major sporting event hires ambulances, stocked with EMTs, to idle outside in case of injury. If a player needs treatment by outside medical personnel, even just for a sprained ankle, he or she has left the secure area and will need to isolate for 14 days before returning to it. And, of course, medical resources need to be abundant enough that society can afford to have ambulances and EMTs on call for games, plus doctors and nurses—clad in currently-scarce protective equipment—who can tend to sports injuries.

Minor leagues cannot afford to play to empty stadiums, so you also need a taxi squad of players practicing in isolation in case someone gets hurt. And because players recognize that a championship won under these circumstances will be seen as tainted, expect them to be less likely to play through injury.

After each game, everyone will need to be transported back to the hotel. If the NBA plays in Las Vegas, as has been proposed, the personnel might be able to walk from the court to their rooms. If MLB plays at spring training sites in Arizona, as it is considering, the league will have to hire bus drivers—who will, of course, also have to be isolated. And then once they are back in their rooms, every person involved will have to follow rules. You can’t take your kids to the park. You can’t run to the grocery store. You can’t invite your Bumble match up to your room. These are humans, so the leagues would surely require insurance: That means security personnel (another group that would need to isolate) or invasive cell phone tracking (good luck getting that by the players’ union). If your wife gives birth or your father dies of cancer and you want to be there, that’s another 14-day reentry period.

And ethically, Bergstrom says, “you need informed consent.” That means everyone has to opt in and no one’s paycheck can hang in the balance.

Fine. So no one touches anyone else or goes anywhere. Experts agree that if everything goes perfectly, the leagues could theoretically pull this off. Baseball has the advantage of little in-game contact between players. Basketball and hockey have the advantage of being able to skip ahead to the playoffs and eliminate teams quickly. Football has the advantage of time. Individual sports such as golf and tennis might have the best chance of all, given the smaller number of participants and relative ease of keeping them separate.

But there are a million ways the Jenga stack could fall: What if the person delivering groceries to the biodome walks by someone who coughs on the lettuce and a week later, a player tests positive? Is there an option other than shutting down the whole operation for 14 days?

“No,” says Bergstrom.

And that’s really the end of the conversation. Even if we can start this, we almost certainly can’t finish it. Just look at South Korea and Japan, which both believed they had the outbreak under control and have since pushed back the start dates of their professional baseball seasons. In response to ESPN's reporting on the MLB biodome scenario this week, former Medicare and Medicaid head Andy Slavitt tweeted, “I’m as big a sports fan as anybody, but this is reckless. Leagues need to follow the science & do the right thing.”

The leagues know how farfetched their ideas are. So do the players’ unions. They continue to explore options because they would be remiss not to. But fans should understand how unlikely this all is.

No one wants to acknowledge how far we are from ordinary life, says Kimberley Miner, a professor at the University of Maine who develops risk assessment for the U.S. Army. “It’s hard to stomach a lot of this information, so it’s not being widely shared,” she explains.

But the reality is that even after we pass the initial peak of infection, the virus is still active. We have already lost more than 16,000 Americans to this disease. Bringing back sports soon would give people a reason to stay inside, a reason to feel hopeful. It would probably also cost more lives.

“If people just decide to let it burn in most areas and we do lose a couple million people it’d probably be over by the fall,” says Binney. “You’d have football. You’d also have two million dead people. And let’s talk about that number. We’re really bad at dealing with big numbers. That is a Super Bowl blown up by terrorists, killing every single person in the building, 24 times in six months. It’s 9/11 every day for 18 months. What freedoms have we given up, what wars have we fought, what blood have we shed, what money have we spent in the interest of stopping one more 9/11? This is 9/11 every day for 18 months.”

The peanuts and Cracker Jack will be waiting for us when sports are ready to come back. Only the virus will determine when that is.

I hope the price of oil stays low indefinitely.

https://www.goal.com/en/news/premier-league-risks-becoming-a-patsy-by-allowing-saudi-takeover-/hje8slz1bpq115lrvnwe9i0is