VIRUS DIARY: Football in Great Britain loses passion, soul without fans

Old Tamer, Associated Press

Updated

8:20 am PDT, Monday June 29, 2020

LONDON (AP) – What have I learned about pandemic football – I mean football, of course – since he returned to England?

You see soulless games without fans out of deep-seated habit – and the misguided hope that kills you. Your team implodes, also out of deep-rooted habit. All in all, an additional inconvenience in difficult times.

But let’s rewind.

According to the grand scheme of things, sport during the pandemic is only a matter of life or death if players, employees or fans are infected. Perhaps an updated representation of the famous Karl Marx quote: Has sport become the opium of the people?

In the UK where I live, some politicians dared that the return of professional football without fans to seats, called Project Restart, would raise national morale. Questionable.

It is a passionate game, the elixir of life for which fans are. This applies across Europe and beyond.

Supporters, many dressed in team colors, are a breathing, billowing, screaming crowd – they live every moment, every decision, with joyful outbursts or howls of ridicule. Chants full of industrial language promote hero worship at best and at worst the depths of utter racism and xenophobia.

Seeing the English Premier League on its return was exciting for me – a pretty bizarre feeling after following my London team Arsenal at home and abroad for decades.

So far the team has never played a home game that I would normally take part in. Looking at other empty stages has made a decision: whether to choose the fake audio atmosphere created by the channels.

No thanks. That includes salmon tracks, lip synchronization and ghostwriting. For me it is a natural sound – the excited loads of players, coaches and the ball that is kicked and directed.

The first two games I saw my team lost. Once against a superior team, hardly registered on the anger scale. The second, against an inferior one, was brought down because of a long-term injury to our goalkeeper due to unnecessary fouling by an opponent who then rubbed salt into the wound by scoring the winning goal in the last few seconds.

But it passed quickly, faster than ever.

A close friend and colleague who has supported Arsenal all his life felt in our hyper-connected world live from New York. We WhatsApp-ed, then we continued with the rest of our weekends.

The same friend and I had taken part in a match that we still remember, where a winning goal, a penalty deep in injury time, my lunatics, including us, had sent and the roof seemed to be taking off.

These are the joys. Comradeship with several people, with whom I have been sitting as season ticket holders for more than a quarter of a century. The pre-game rituals, the pub for a few laid-back people (or not, if my teenage son, who has been out of the game in recent years, is with me – a rare treat).

Then a victory on Thursday – but still watch bleakly.

I will watch the games every few days while the league is racing to complete the interrupted season. But let’s not kid ourselves: like so many other things, this was a financial decision, as locks are loosened around the world to revitalize flatlining economies. Hundreds of millions in different currencies are at stake for the monstrous cash cow brand. global TV rights are in balance.

But the pandemic’s first home game of the rest of the season this week will feel particularly soulless if you expose it to the fans and expose it to me. And I can’t even imagine when it’s going to be insane to go back to an event with about 60,000 other people.

Strengthen memories. Maybe Humphrey Bogarts Rick was right in Casablanca: “We will always …”

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An occasional feature, Virus Diary shows the coronavirus pandemic through the eyes of Associated Press journalists around the world. See previous entries here. Follow Tamer Fakahany, AP’s deputy director of global news coordination, at https://twitter.com/tamerfakahany