For a long time there was simmering between the Bavarian Football Association (BFV) and the Bavarian state government, now a volcanic eruption threatens. After the Council of Ministers had extended the central regulations of the current infection protection measures to September 18 on Tuesday and thus neither the approval of spectators nor the general approval of the competition game operation had taken place, the BFV announced on Wednesday that it would let its around 4,500 member clubs vote on it whether legal action should be taken against this decision and whether an action should be taken.
The specialist lawyers entrusted by the association are of the opinion “that a lawsuit against the unequal treatment of amateur football by the Bavarian Infection Protection Measures Ordinance has a good chance of success,” said BFV President Rainer Koch. “For most of them it is incomprehensible that we are currently unable to start games, although the state government has long since allowed concerts or church services to be held in the open air, and up to 400 spectators are allowed. Only a few kilometers away In our neighboring federal states, games have long been played in front of a limited number of spectators, “wrote Koch in his letter to the clubs. “Why is this so? We can’t say it! Because politics still owes this answer to us and you.” The clubs have until Monday to take part in the survey, the association intends to evaluate and publish the results before the next meeting of the Council of Ministers on Tuesday.
Bavarian amateur football “still lacks any perspective,” said the BFV, “and the effects are gradually taking on extremely worrying forms, not just from an economic point of view”. Especially in the youngest age groups, more and more children would break away from the clubs, compared to the same period in the previous year, for example, there were almost 20 percent fewer children in the F-Juniors: “The trend is rising.” The BFV expects that no further easing will be decided in the next two weeks, which would make amateur football in Bavaria “impossible” in September.
The situation remains difficult for the clubs – even if a resumption of play without spectators would be approved soon. “If we could only play without a spectator, it makes no sense to us. Then we pay more,” says Thomas Reinhardt, sporting director of the regional division FC Memmingen. A home game without spectators would cost the club, which has sold around 450 season tickets, a few thousand euros. For Manfred Fleckenstein, CFO at league competitor Viktoria Aschaffenburg, the situation is “meanwhile unbearable and is slowly taking on bizarre forms”. He supports all efforts to resume gaming as soon as possible, “including the judicial process as a last resort”. For Fleckenstein, games without a viewer would “temporarily” come into question: “Then we would just have to be creative. If the viewers can’t come to us, we just have to go to them,” he says, thinking about paid live stream transmissions which one could generate minimum income at least for a certain phase. League colleague 1. FC Schweinfurt 05 has also filed an urgent application against the ban on spectators at the Bavarian Administrative Court in Munich: “The clubs have watched long enough, now it’s about livelihoods,” said managing director Markus Wolf.
Of course, other team contact sports are also affected by the government decision. Robert Daumann, sports advisor for the Bavarian Basketball Association (BBV), does not speak well about the political decision. “A lot of things are incomprehensible to me,” he emphasizes, “I need sport, even in competition.” His association had submitted a general hygiene concept, but “it doesn’t matter,” he complains. Daumann says he can wait until September 18. If then still no decision has been made, he would be forced to postpone the start of the season of the Bavarian leagues by a month. Most leagues would start in October as of now.
In ice hockey, the Bavarian regulation even has nationwide effects. The German Ice Hockey Federation (DEB) was forced to cancel the planned start of the season for the highest junior league, the DNL U20 Division 1, from 5./6. September to the 26./27. September to be relocated, as the Bavarian teams are initially not allowed to participate in the competition. “We have worked a lot at the DEB in a political direction and tried everything to realize the planned start of the DNL 1 season. Now we are working intensively on it to start at the end of September,” said league leader Markus Schubert.
A further extension of the measures would also be critical for Andreas Heßelmann, youth and match operations manager in the Bavarian Handball Association (BHV). He also reports on a case that shows how shaky the current construct is. The youth Bundesliga club TSV Allach recently took part in a tournament abroad, where corona tests were part of the hygiene protocol. When an Allach player tested positive, the entire team had to be quarantined for 14 days. The men’s team was also affected by this. Heßelmann therefore asks himself to what extent gaming operations are possible with these quarantine requirements: “That’s where we start, and after two weeks it may be over again.” According to Heßelmann, games without spectators would be conceivable in phases in the lower leagues, but for Allach or second division TuS Fürstenfeldbruck such a decision would be “fatal, they planned with the money”. Here, too, the youth sector is a major victim of uncertainty. Heßelmann points out that at the moment “you can’t win children over to handball either”.
.
