This crises should be a walk up call to fundamentally change our system. It’s wrong that the welfare of the people is so directly linked to economic circumstances. But when this is over we all go back to status quo. That includes football.
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WHO declared COVID not that dangerous in January, they should have no say in anything.
Not if you put in terms like that, people aren’t en masse going to stand up and denounce the excesses of football. But people’s behaviour will change. Maybe not loudly, but people will reassess their priorities and the amount of money pumped into the game is going to take a hit.
Epidemics change societies, and there is going to be an impact. Its unpredictable in many ways, but the effect on people’s resources isn’t.
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I thought the middle classes where already priced out of Premier League football anyway?
I used to love it when Arsenal’s failings were my biggest concern in life, I’m chomping at the bit for that to return to being the case.
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To answer a flippant answer with another, they’re about to be priced out of TV subscriptions as well as the actual game too 
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So the actual problem is the greed of football. I think that has bothered you for a longer time. What they do or don’t do during this crises doesn’t really matter.
The people that could afford all these pre-lockdown are likely gonna be able to post lockdown to be fair. Unless their life has completely been flipped upside down leaving them broke.
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Yeah I know but that should mean we need better WHO rather than believing that every institute should have their own pandemic board in place.
WHO should have done far far far better than they did.
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I think this is it. Those of us who have felt this way for a while just kind of kept going along with it because Football kept going along but with football now stopped we’ve a reason to think on it a bit more.
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This is my feeling as well. These are unprecedented times and making predictions about the future is a guessing game, but I find any idea that there will be some huge kind of sea change in the attitudes of sports going fans to be quite unlikely.
Surely the very first thing millions of football fans are going to want to do as soon as they can is to go and enjoy football again, even if some with think twice about doing so at first. I think in the end it will all get back to normal, as strange as things are now.
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If COVID-19 goes away after killing 100,000 ppl or so and the majority of the world are unaffected, I see it going back to the status quo. However if it persists and this turns into some type of hellscape post apocalyptic world because the economy collapses ect, clearly there will be massive changes. This decadence of the PL and all major sports leagues around the world will no longer be palatable.
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Yeah agree. Just can’t see Premier League or football in general continuing in a Mad Max style world either.
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Wait what? How would you imagine that post-apocalyptic world? I think our governments are always going to bail us out if it’s really needed.
Well, as the world’s most popular sport, most played sport, I think an argument could very well be made that it is an integral part of society. That said, I don’t really think anyone is suggesting that society’s resources should be diverted into football to save it/bail it out, I haven’t heard of that anyways, and really the argument then you would be getting into is how important is entertainment to society, if society needs entertainment to function, and I think we’d find pretty quickly that the answer to that is yes, if we don’t already know it for a fact already. The rest is just supply and demand under capitalism, if people choose to spend their money on football on limited budgets well that’s just how capitalism/free markets work, people spend their money on things, businesses compete for their attention to spend on those things, they spend it not always in the wisest fashion, and some of those things include entertainment.
I don’t really see what hospital beds football players are going to be taking up that could be used for coronavirus. I’m sure as far as high-level, first-division football goes, they can get by without hospital beds and just using their numerous facilities and club physicians should the demand for hospital beds still be a major issue when football resumes. If the issue is wanting to avoid all possible activity that could end up in use of hospital bed use well far better targets would be things like driving…and while that’s extreme, because we know how much society and the economy is reliant on it, certainly you would have far higher gains in terms of hospital bed preservation restricting the amount of driving than you would restricting the amount of football played. Anyways, point being, if you want to start going down that route of preventing potentially hazardous activities that could result in the need for medical attention, there are many, many you would single out before football.
Can someone explain to me coherently what greed in football actually is to them? Because all I see is a field of business, like any other. Some companies are a bit cleaner than others, some bend the rules a bit more than others in an attempt to get ahead, but in the end they’re all playing by more or less the same rules, and doing the things that companies do in capitalist markets. Why exactly is it that people want football of all things to act differently? Do people complain about greed in Hollywood or film making companies or music labels or Netflix or Amazon as much? Because you’d really have to if you want to coherently single out football, and even then in my opinion you’re barking up the wrong tree (ie I’d bark up the system tree, not the way things act under the system tree).
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No. Not really. Think its just pretty natural when you’re a near 40 year old who grew up on 90s football when players were still accessible/like us etc to just feel a little bit disconnected from the current product. Especially so in my case where I have access to a local team like Rovers who feel a bit more like what I remember then.
The current PL set up is what it is. I can take or leave it and for the most part i leave it but I dont like what its become if I’m being honest. The 90s model is of course completely unrealistic nowadays too but like I say this pause has given me something to think on.
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