Football returns hostage to Covid: risk test to enter the stadium

FIGC and clubs await new indications after the surge in infections Even vaccinated people are checked: it can happen in January, on Thursday it is decided

THE SCENERY

England, Germany and now us too. Our football is preparing to experience the last stage of the first round of the championship – Serie A on the pitch between today and tomorrow – with the ghost of Covid that materializes in patches as it did until last spring. The positivity index rises (yesterday at 4.8 per cent) and the fear that the agenda and programs will be distorted, or at least touched, rises. It thus happens that the ASL returns to the spotlight and decides to stop the Salernitana: trip to Udine suspended. And it happens that Lecce-Vicenza is postponed in Serie B, the second match not played last night, after Benevento-Monza last Saturday: two positives in the Salento squad.

What awaits us in the near future? Thursday will be a watershed day, very political, a little technical. The Government should deliver a new protocol of action to football and its facilities as, moreover, for all contexts where the risk of crowding is high: the stadium is entered with a negative swab, even if vaccinated. The FIGC and the club are waiting for new indications with the logical concern of those who, in the pandemic, have already paid one billion and 200 thousand euros in lost revenues, but the FIGC and the clubs know that public safety does not allow compromises: when the championship will recover from the break, and for the days of Epiphany and January 9, the stands could be even more empty because the requirement of the pre-race test could favor the absence of the public, although of absence, in some situations, we can already talk now that the entrance to 75 per cent of the capacity does not include tampons, but only the Green pass.

Political choice will also be the one that the Serie B clubs have scheduled: on Thursday, the category assembly will decide whether to stop for the end-of-year appointments, including Boxing Day. In the championship led by the surprise Pisa, Covid has put players from Ascoli, Como, Spal, Alessandria out of the game as well as boys from Monza and Lecce: thus, a drastic turn is not excluded.

England, Germany and now us too. The ASL are alerted because of an Omicron variant that brings football back to the time of the Delta variant: in Serie A, 98 percent of members underwent the double vaccination against only 68 percent of the Premier League, but the risk contagion remains high. The feeling is that navigation on sight has started again, an inevitable pace at the time of Covid. The economic costs of the pandemic are frightening and, above all, they still take away the sleep of troubled societies. –