Platini’s poisoned legacy and he must see
it through to the end.
Euro 2020 is a perfect example of the
price the game is paying for extravagance
and greed. The qualifying crossover with
the Nations League – which was widely
welcomed at the time – means that 16
teams are still to play out qualifying ties
in indefinable time slots.
Different countries have been
besieged by coronavirus at differing times
and with differing impacts. How and
when any of them may emerge from
lockdown is impossible to calculate.
In Italy the first country markets
reopened at the start of April, as
did some garden centres in Germany.
Simultaneously the United Kingdom
was still at least one or two weeks
away from the predicted peak
of depredation. In England,
scientists reported London
as being “one week ahead”
of the rest of the country.
In all of this, FIFA president
Gianni Infantino, for all his sporting
omnipotence, has been impotent.
He has issued the appropriate
messages about the priorities of
public health and was probablyrelieved to kick into the long grass his
widely derided plan for an expanded
Club World Cup in China in 2021.
UEFA has cancelled some but not
all of its age-group tournaments.
This is because several also act
as qualifying events for FIFA’s
age-group world cups. No one
knows whether these qualifiers
can even be played in time to suit
FIFA’s own calendar. Meanwhile,
Infantino has promised to conjure
up a multimillion-dollar relief fund.
How relieved he must be that FIFA
possesses those vast cash reservesCoronavirus in footballUnhappy...Ajax technical
director Marc Overmars