Premier League amidst lockdown, but at what cost?

Chennai, January 7: Though UK government announced a nationwide lockdown, the Premier League football and other elite professional sports have been given the green light to continue, possibly till the third week of February, a decision that was met with scepticism in certain quarters.

The Football Association (FA) and EFL have been given assurances about the continuation of elite sport ahead of the weekend’s FA Cup fixtures.

The key in determining whether a sporting competition will be given the nod to go ahead will be if it has, as the Premier League does, a testing plan and the provision of proper bio-secure bubbles in place.

The games will however be allowed to continue only behind closed doors.

Since December, four Premier League games have been postponed due to the spike in novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic cases at different clubs involved in the competition.

Burnley v Fulham postponed amid more coronavirus cases

The FA has rescheduled the postponed matches for the month of May.

The Premier League have announced plans to increase the COVID-19 testing among clubs to twice a week, after an increase in the number of cases, since the start of the 2020-21 season.

Five Premier League clubs initiated internal probe of their own after images surfaced online of their players breaking COVID-19 rules over the Christmas-New Year festive period.

The aficionados want the Premier League to continue at any cost for the sake of finances as football has been struggling during the pandemic with games being played behind closed doors.

Another cause for concern is that the multi-million television deals that would also be at risk if there was another stoppage as it happened in March 2019, at the oubreak of the COVID-19 pandemic after which the Premier League clubs and the FA incurred huge losses.