Rules, Resumptions and a Matter of Trust

Rules, Rescheduled Games and a Covenant Worth Preserving

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The Premier League Handbook is so long that calling it a handbook is, in many ways, a bit of a stretch. It runs, all told, to 665 pages. It falls somewhere between a particularly dense instruction manual and an especially didactic piece of scripture.

It lays out, in a sea of sections and subsections, exactly how a club must be run if it wishes to be part of the most popular domestic sports league in the world. And exactly means exactly: no stone is left unturned, no detail uncovered.

What players must wear while performing off-field duties: clothing bearing the club’s crest. How long a postgame warm-down can last: 15 minutes, and not a second longer. What teams are and are not allowed to show on the big screens in their home stadiums: no rolling live footage, thank you very much.

The only thing that is not included, as became abundantly clear on the evening of March 13, is what might happen if the league season cannot be completed. Section C — “The League Championship” — had nothing to say on the matter.

The handbook will, presumably, be updated; there is already a 50-page appendix governing how teams should safely return to training in the midst of the current coronavirus pandemic, which forced the season’s suspension more than two months ago. That will be done either by decree or by precedent, but it felt then (and it still feels now) like something of an oversight.

The arrival of an aggressive pathogen is, after all, not the only thing that might have caused the cessation of soccer. War has done it in the past, civil unrest has done it elsewhere, and player strikes have managed it in other sports. Given soccer’s economics, it is not entirely unimaginable that the collapse of a broadcast partner might pose an existential threat, too.

But the handbook did not offer any guidance. This was the one eventuality nobody seemed to have ever considered. It spoke only silence. And so, for the last two months, there has been nothing but noise.

Over the course of hours and hours of meetings — and days and weeks of whisper and suggestion and briefing — the executives of the Premier League have tried to conjure an answer to the one question none of them had ever felt the need, previously, to ask.

Only on Thursday, as May drew to a close, did they land upon one. In Germany, the Bundesliga had already been playing for two weeks. In Spain, the game’s authorities had long since committed themselves to playing out the season. In France, where the league’s hand was forced by the government, Paris St.-Germain had already been named champion.

Now, at last, England has a way forward, too: the Premier League will return on June 17, as long as it retains political permission and there is no spike in either the positive tests returned by players or the infection rate across Britain.

If it cannot return, the season will be determined on a points-per-game basis (effectively freezing the table as it stands, with one or two exceptions). It will name a champion. It will relegate its three worst teams. At last, the idea of “null and void” is off the table.

For a while, that seemed to be the preferred solution of a number of teams who exist entirely to play soccer. For some time, there has been a constituency in the Premier League for whom all that matters is being there: not excelling, not winning games, not entertaining anyone, but simply existing in the top flight of English soccer. Null and void seemed to be the natural conclusion of that approach: it did not matter if anyone played any soccer at all, it turned out, as long as they could keep on cashing those television checks.

It was initially dressed up in an understandable, fairly compelling, morality: The very idea that soccer should return was almost offensive, they said. Then, later: The idea that the league should be played out in empty stadiums, compromising its integrity, was unfair, they said. Then later still: soccer could be played without fans, they said, but not at neutral venues; or it could be played at neutral venues, but nobody could be relegated.

There is merit to some of these arguments. Certainly, in April, it felt distasteful to try to map out the return of a mere sport (we have established previously that it is morally O.K. to miss sports, no matter what else is going on) as the peak of the pandemic raged and it seemed there was no end to the nightmare and no hope to be had.

Less significantly, the Bundesliga’s experience does suggest that the absence of fans has a dramatic impact on results: Home-field advantage seems, almost overnight, to have disappeared in Germany. And it is true that the desire to play games at neutral venues — in case crowds gather outside stadiums — is, in essence, an egregious insult to those fans upon whom the entire edifice rests.

That those arguments have not won the day, though, is a relief. Not because the only “fair” way to settle the season was always to play it out. Not because of the economic imperative — for the health of the clubs and, to some extent, the game as a whole — to find a way back.

And not because it is necessarily right that soccer will return. It remains, after all, a delicate balance. There is no guarantee that the English — or even the German — season will be able to finish. It may well be that one or both is decided, in the end, off the field, by some mathematical formula.

But that is vastly preferable to voiding it, to scratching it from the record books, pretending it never happened, starting over whenever we can. Not because that was never really necessary, or because it is inherently unfair, or because it prioritizes things that did not happen over things that did. No, it is preferable for a much more fundamental reason.

There is a covenant between fans and the sports they follow. It runs that what the fans are watching, what they are investing their time and money in, counts for something. It matters. It has meaning; an artificial meaning, something that we impose, rather than something inherent, but a meaning nonetheless.

To write off the season, then, would not only be to strip the first nine months of this season of that meaning; it would also jeopardize the meaning of any season in the future. It would make it hard to invest financially in a season ticket or a television subscription. More important, frankly, it would make it hard to invest emotionally in a team again.

Why would you, after all, if someone might tell you a few months later that what you were watching happened, but it didn’t count, it didn’t mean anything? Voiding the season would have ruptured the bond we have with the sport. One of the rationales you hear, frequently, from those who would have abandoned it is that — at a time like this — soccer doesn’t matter. Cancellation would have been confirmation that it doesn’t matter at any time.

That, perhaps, is what the new, revised Premier League handbook should reflect. Just an addendum to Section C: a clause that says, in case the worst should happen again, what you are watching, what you are playing in, what you are part of, cannot be extinguished by some force majeure. It will all, in the end, count for something.

This Is the Future, for Now. We May as Well Try.

There is a golden rule of the internet. It is not, despite what a lot of people think, Godwin’s Law. It is this: If you put something on the internet, at some point in the process some man — and it is, essentially, always a man — will hijack it for the purposes of some form of sexual gratification.

And so nobody, but nobody, should have been surprised on Thursday that when the Danish club AGF Aarhus invited fans to join its first game of the resumed season on Zoom, two men had to be cut from the feed by the club’s moderator for exposing themselves. (Thankfully, before their little stunt had been seen by anyone).

It is a bleak reality, don’t get me wrong. It isn’t funny. I can’t explain it. I don’t even begin to understand it. But it should also not distract from the fact there is something encouraging in Aarhus’s experiment. If we accept that fans are not going to be in stadiums for some time, then clubs, leagues and broadcasters should be looking for ways not to soften the blow, but to adapt.

In Germany, the league’s broadcaster is offering ambient crowd noise to viewers watching at home. In South Korea, they pumped it directly into the stadium. Bringing fans into the stands through Zoom is a valiant attempt to go a step further. (Our friend Tariq Panja will have an article on the AGF match, and video from it, later today on nytimes.com.)

All of these modifications are anathema to the purist, of course. But — to reuse a phrase — the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Fans cannot go into stadiums. Soccer can spend the coming months bemoaning that. Or it can find a way to make this reality as palatable as possible. Who knows? Perhaps some of the ideas might last longer than the crisis.

This Is the Best of Those Ideas

There are not many ways in which soccer will emerge from the darkness of the last three months stronger. It will be poorer, certainly. It may have burned quite a lot of good will. Arsène Wenger, as previously noted, is among those who wonder if the hollow quiet of empty stadiums might tarnish a bit of its magic for good.

But there is one silver lining. It is a very slim one, admittedly, but still: Are we in a position to be choosy? It is this. English soccer will stage the semifinals and final of the F.A. Cup in the same week — all behind closed doors, obviously, and all at Wembley. This is, clearly, a Heath Robinson solution, a way of crossing the Ts and dotting the lowercase Js of the season. It is also, quite possibly, the best idea anyone has had during the long span of the shutdown.

This should become the standard. In fact, it should go further. Next year, why not hold off on playing the quarterfinals of the cup — usually held in late March — until the week after the season has finished? Then play the semifinals a few days later, and the final the following weekend?

The glamour and significance of the F.A. Cup has been fading for years. It now ranks, for most teams, either as a nuisance or as an afterthought. Adjusting the schedule in this way solves many of those problems at once.

It turns the cup final into the season’s final act. It turns the later rounds into a compelling mini-tournament, staged at a time when fans have nothing else to watch. And it diminishes how much the cup interrupts the league season, buying teams a little more breathing space in the schedule. It is perfect. Let’s not make it a one-off.

Correspondence

Last week’s column on the effect of Athletic Bilbao’s buy-local approach to transfers prompted quite a few questions. Patricia Zengerle had mixed feelings about the idea, asking: “In an international, multicultural sport, does the team stay white white white?” Not entirely, is the answer — Athletic’s star performer this year has been the striker Iñaki Williams — and the policy does not officially see color, as it were. But (without having conducted a survey) I would guess that Athletic’s team is whiter than most in Spain, and has been for some time.

Daniel Arbelaez, meanwhile, suggested that the “underlying elements of nationalism” the policy raises are “disturbing.” Edward Baker points out that Athletic’s definition of “Basque” can be traced to Sabino Arana, the father of Basque nationalism now widely regarded as a problematic figure. “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, charming about this repulsive blood-and-soil nationalism and its expression in the history of Athletic de Bilbao,” he wrote.

There is, of course, an uncomfortable undertone to the roots of Athletic’s approach, and one that should have been acknowledged; these are valid critiques. So, too, is the reminder from the author Phil Ball that other teams in the Basque region tend to suffer from Athletic’s predation of the best local talent.

It would not be possible for Athletic’s model to be implemented directly elsewhere; in an ideological sense, it would not necessarily be desirable. Last week’s column was not an attempt to condone that, but to suggest that what could be learned is that it is possible both to find pleasure in and take pride from a sports team while accepting that it will not win all of the time.

Mere mention of Sporting Clube de Portugal, too, encouraged Francisco Valente — and he was not alone — to set me right. “The reason we don’t use Sporting Lisbon is simple: we are proud to support a club that, despite its Lisbon origins, became a national one, bringing together supporters from all corners of our small country,” he wrote. He’s right, too. It turned out it was quite a bright idea.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for all the messages. As ever, ideas, hints, tips and assessments of controversial Spanish historical figures are all welcome at askrory@nytimes.com, or on Twitter. We talked about how coaches manage players on this week’s Set Piece Menu. And feel free to send your friends and relatives here, and tell them it has made lockdown a little bit more bearable for you.

Stay safe.

Rory