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Ken Early: Despite coronavirus, Premier League season must be finished if at all possible

Voiding the current campaign would leave far too many clubs unfairly treated

A view of locked gates at Old Trafford, home of Manchester United. Photo: Martin Rickett/PA Wire

Ken Early's face
Ken Early
Mon Mar 30 2020 - 06:00

Football is suspended in every European country except Belarus, but behind the scenes the jockeying for position is in full cry. What should happen when the sport gets the all-clear to resume? Should we pick up from where we left off, or are we reaching the point when the best solution is to draw a line under 2019-20 and proceed on the basis that we will begin afresh with a new season and a clean slate?

On one level, it is of course futile to talk about what will happen when football starts back up when nobody has any idea when that will be. Nobody knows when the current restrictions will be eased. Juventus have given us an indication of what they are expecting by announcing that their players have agreed to waive the salary due for the four months from March to June 2020. They plainly are not planning to be back in any kind of action before July.

Within English football, there is still an appetite to play out the Premier League season behind closed doors, which would be the simplest solution in terms of fulfilling broadcast contracts, and deciding the contentious issues arising from where teams finish in the table. The idea that "football without fans is nothing" always seemed like a truism before, but when the alternative is the total absence of the game, then football without fans is better than nothing.

Is there a way of declaring the season over, without playing out the matches, that could be agreed on by all parties?

But even behind-closed-doors matches still involve gatherings of a couple of hundred people, and the authorities may decide that such gatherings create an unacceptable risk of fuelling the contagion. It may be that large-scale organised football cannot actually coexist with this virus, that matches simply cannot take place where people are also trying to contain the spread of Sars-CoV-2. Football would be just another privilege that cannot be restored until the virus is under control. In another couple of weeks this may seem obvious to everyone, just as it now seems obvious to us that it was madness for football to keep going for as long as it did through an earlier phase of the pandemic.

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Destroyed

That the season would be completed after a pause was the natural assumption at the point when the season was suspended. The longer the suspension goes on, the more it starts to seem as though we should accept that the 2019-20 season has been destroyed and cannot now be completed in any meaningful sense, and that the best solution would be one that minimises the damage and disruption to the 2020-21 season.

Yet this logic also depends on the assumption that it will be possible to begin the 20-21 season on time. If distancing measures are still needed in August – and if the virus continues to circulate in the community, then why wouldn’t they be? – then you reach a point where everything is such a huge mess that you might as well finish off the last season before figuring out when and how to kick off the next one.

Is there a way of declaring the season over, without playing out the matches, that could be agreed on by all parties? Simply declaring the current table as the final table is unfair in a number of ways: teams have not played against the same selection of opponents, and they have not even played the same number of games.

The idea of cancelling the season doesn't mean the same thing to everybody: there are winners and losers. The winners include all the clubs currently at risk of relegation, which is why West Ham's Karren Brady was so keen on this solution. The biggest potential losers are Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion, who are currently on course for automatic promotion from the Championship. Other losers include the clubs chasing qualification for the Champions League – Manchester United, Sheffield United, Wolves, Tottenham and Arsenal. And of course there is Liverpool, who have all but won the title but have not yet mathematically sealed the deal.

The easiest path to a negotiated settlement is to pay off the losers. Leeds and West Brom could be promoted without anyone having to be relegated, and the Premier League could become a 42-game competition for one season.

Leicester and Chelsea are the sides in possession of third and fourth places, but Manchester United, Wolves and Arsenal had all been in better form when the season was suspended

As for Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp spent much of the season complaining about fixture congestion only for that problem to suddenly melt into air, as though at the wave of a cursed monkey's paw. All Liverpool really want is for that league title to be confirmed and though the only real way to confirm it is on the field, the notion that they could be declared champions doesn't sound controversial. There are not many statistical models that would give Manchester City a chance of making up a 25-point gap with 10 matches left to play.

Lucrative

The issue of Champions League qualification defies easy resolution. The top European competition is so lucrative that we can assume it will be restarted at the earliest possible opportunity. Space will be found for the competition in the calendar: if it's a choice between the Champions League and the League Cup, well, one of these competitions is worth up to €150 million to participating teams, the other doesn't have a name.

How to decide who gets in? Leicester and Chelsea are the sides in possession of third and fourth places, but Manchester United, Wolves and Arsenal had all been in better form when the season was suspended. How could the last 10 matches be gamed out? Could the first VAR Premier League season also become the first to have the final places decided by computer simulation?

You can imagine the last 10 matches being simulated, with the results determined over the course of a one-day televised mega-event. Clubs would be bound by agreement to accept the outcome, like a sort of digital arbitration. Managers would have to call in on Zoom and watch their teams' destinies be decided through the medium of Championship Manager 01-02-style flashing text commentary ("Mike Dean reaches for his pocket and pulls out the red card!! It's an early bath for Mason Mount! That looked a harsh decision! Mike Dean has made a hash of that!")

Yet it’s hard to imagine how the parameters of any such simulation could be agreed on in the first place. In the end you are left back where you began. The best solution is actually to finish the season, whenever that proves possible, and only then start to worry about what happens next.

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