Stuart

It was too soon to restart a sport where social distancing can’t be maintained. In other news though, it saddens me to read people on here talking about trying to make BCD a success and even suggesting fans don’t really make much difference anyway. Astonishing really. Imagine permanently watching football only on TV? That’s bad enough but I assume as far as the lower league teams go, it’s just hard luck? There but for the grace of God go I...

The diminished crowds could well be another rationale used to justify increased TV coverage which becomes even more self fulfilling. Not sure this genie will go back in the bottle. TV companies might even be offering short term concessions for long term increased involvement.

Definitely some merit in that. Just hope we haven’t missed the boat...

Wait. Restart this season in March 2021.

How is it self centred to say that if it isn’t safe for spectators then it isn’t safe and as a result BCD is a bad idea? You seem worried about the financial impact but only for less than half of league clubs. The financial impact is worse for L1/L2 but they can’t afford to invest in weekly testing. PL and Championship clubs facing financial ruin are the ones who have been living beyond their means for years. Why do they deserve saving more? Let a Man Utd or an Arsenal go pop rather than a Fylde or other. These clubs have become junkies hooked on TV money and unable to get off it. Meanwhile others suffer instead. BCD is just a distraction and serves to prove that clubs don’t regard fans as being as important to them as TV. Sad.

You’re mixing up normal with BCD. They are incompatible. Socially distancing while going to the shop is not the same as watching training ground football for points. For one thing, the sole purpose of shops is provisions, these can conveniently be delivered. Football is a form of entertainment derived from local tribalism which needs (and generates) atmosphere and emotion as much as it is about the technical ability to kick a plastic ball. The point you seem to have taken umbrage to is that Rovers fans (on a messageboard) are more interested in Rovers than the wider (and now completely and literally sterile) PL. I’d say that’s how it should be considering we aren’t in it. The PL has been rubbish for a while now. All the best players are in Spain! Do we even know if the Championship (returning 20th June - thanks @davulsukur) - will be on TV or radio? To at least add some relevance to the debate.

Good post. “It is not a decision made to purposely to try and tailor the game towards the armchair supporters” The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people he didn’t exist - Roger “Verbal” Kint Granted, they haven’t engineered a virus to create the current circumstances but I expect they will certainly try to take advantage of the situation. ‘Football’ could have stood firm and said “no fans, no football” and paid back the piper. The EFL certainly should, they are hardly supported like the PL is. Instead, they have caved in the worst way - they will say through necessity but this single decision to not stand up against TV companies on a force majeure basis will have permanent repercussions. As a minimum a split in football at the top divisions. By resuming with BCD this season, the 3pm rule is now broken. By beginning next season on the same basis, how easy will it be to then stop and go back to the ‘sacrosanct 3 o’clock blackout’ to protect lower leagues and grass roots? Nobody cares about them now so why in the future? Who will decide when it is safe for fans to return and would this new arrangement be a factor? I guess we will see. Personally, I believe that there to be a mission by TV companies to eventually show every game live. There is almost certainly a ready-made market for it in the streaming age. VAR is already creeping insidiously into the game. How long until football is like U.S. sports with stop-start TV-integrated-rules and ad breaks during every stoppage? “The fans will never put up with that” has always been the riposte. Maybe they will no longer have a say...

Posters on a Rovers messageboard being more interested in Rovers than an armchair-neutral “wider world”, who’d have thought? Or maybe I’m just too parochial in my old age!

This is exactly what the TV companies what you to think - and it hasn’t even started yet. Thankfully you are a minority or clubs would be selling their stadiums and upgrading their training facilities. Professional football is only a thing because people wanted to pay to watch and cheer on their team. Football is going to be very sterile. Someone told me to listen on the radio. Well, it would be a pretty quiet radio show - more like an audiobook. Even more daft is that we will probably see garden parties and house parties replace terraces and pubs for a while, negating the social distancing requirement - but at least everyone will be able to have a cheap beer while they watch. TV companies couldn’t have scripted a premature restart any better. Now if they can just convince more people to think like Chaddy...

I cancelled my Sky Sports just before lockdown, and thankfully before they dreamt up the suspension idea. I’ve no intention of renewing. It just isn’t value for money and even when I did have it I found myself watching less and less and almost no PL games, ending up really only watching Rovers away games on red button. The PL has just become sterile. Any fixture involving a team from the (traditional) bottom half was only ever important to me when one of those teams was Blackburn Rovers. As far as BCD, having watched most of the Bayern - Schalke game it did not encourage me to go back one bit. Fanless football indeed! Have to say, hearing that Sky are introducing new features to increase fan interaction sounds foreboding. Far from getting back, this could well be where clubs decide to permanently close a stand or a couple of tiers (Waggott way ahead of the curve on that one) and go all in with the TV companies. (I jest, of course - at least I hope I do!) “New Sky Sports digital innovations also planned to enhance fan experience” https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/11996210/sky-sports-to-show-64-live-premier-league-games-with-25-free-to-air Also, fans are now a ‘contingency’ to BCD with actual spectators to be phased back - how will they be decided?: “No one knows when matches will move away from the behind-closed-doors model and it is right to have contingency plans in place, but there is optimism at the Premier League and at clubs that we will see fans back in the stadiums next season and it may happen on a phased basis," Masters said.” https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11661/11996642/premier-league-chief-executive-richard-masters-optimistic-of-fans-returning-next-season Oh, and to rub salt in the wounds Sky are now offering a sports package which combines their coverage with BT subscription. Brilliant! Just like they used to have when Sky had exclusive rights but now it just costs more. Good old competition laws to protect consumers from being ripped off. Talk about being taken the piss out of! If Jim White thinks it’s a good idea then it probably isn’t! It could be argued that after becoming the proverbial self-licking lollipop, football finally ate itself but the PL handing over control to the TV companies is what has really killed it. Such a shame they can’t franchise the top 10 PL clubs and let the rest of football have real competition - including exclusivity of the FA Cup. Let’s face it, everyone would be happy. “BSkyT” can have it (and the Champions League for me) and terrestrial TV can have the rest.

Brilliant that. Well done.

BCD really doesn’t feel like football is coming back. Feels more like it’s being kidnapped by TV companies.

I’m not blasé, I’m terrified. I’m still a member of the Rovers Trust, you?

If Venkys stop funding the player wages then the club folds. That’s just life, sadly. That should not stop any of us expecting to be treated as valued supporters. Nothing that ‘the club’ has done since Waggott arrived suggests that. (I expect you’ll dismiss it but do you remember when the club used to win Family Club of the Year awards, for instance?). If the club hadn’t furloughed staff then it would be infinitely more acceptable as Blackburn people’s livelihoods would be dependent on it. But otherwise they have their cake and want to eat it too. iFollow could be about to sign up to a lucrative deal to show Championship matches on a much wider scale. All clubs should stick together and insist that 2019/20 ST holders get those games they’ve paid for free. Doesn’t cost anything to anyone, meanwhile iFollow get an increase in market share. Wonder if they will do that?

Why though? If that money was being used then that’s one thing but the lights are all off down at Ewood and as a taxpayer I’m already paying for furloughed staff, while players wages have been deferred - and let’s face it they are paid by Venkys anyway. It’s about time the club stopped treating us as monopolised customers to be exploited (in a business sense) and treated us like fans.

From people I know first hand, an inconclusive test is treated as positive. That said there seems to still be a concern over false negatives.

I thought I read (probably on here though) that Waggott’s master plan was to knock a few quid off next year’s season ticket. A cheap trick which means you have to pay again to get any of that value back. I’d prefer iFollow this season as recompense, although it wouldn’t do anything for the other two season tickets I pay for. At the very least I hope there is a sensible option that allows Rovers fans to watch Rovers matches - for those who do want to.

iFollow?

They will also make a swift and full recovery? How on earth can you know that? And what if any of those people do have underlying health issues? Unlucky? I didn’t expect such a flippant response about this. Football at all costs, eh?

Exactly right. If it were the same rules for everyone it wouldn’t be completed for this exact reason. Unless any of them are related to Dominic Cummings of course. Elliott Bennett has coronavirus and has been in contact with other players this week. Just forget about football for a second and think about the implications of that.

This isn’t true. Anyone he has been into contact with should receive a call or some form of contact from NHS tracing and told to self-isolate for 14 days. They should then get tested and then self isolate for 7 days of positive or return to normal if negative. However, as this is football everyone at the club will be getting a retest today. Straight to the front of the queue. We really should have a better idea now - through testing - where the hotspots are.

You have to wonder if anything good will come out of this epidemic for the future of football. Will any lessons be learned? Right now it seems as though the lower leagues are going to be the hardest hit and yet are receiving the least concern: No income for the remainder of this season; uncertainty around next season (unlike the “TV owned” sides they cannot operate without fans attending); pay cuts/caps for players which will likely see quality suffer, and create an even bigger financial gap between the Championship and League One akin to the PL/CH one. (Would the top two divisions introduce pay caps - moreover would the top divisions in Europe do the same?) PL1 and PL2 by stealth perhaps, no, not stealth, opportunism? People seem to be worried about the integrity of the game when the integrity has already been lost, probably years ago, but certainly when the PL, the Championship, and the “rest of the EFL” are making different decisions for different reasons. The PL and Championship cannot afford to lose significant TV money so are throwing money at testing to create a “football cocoon”, meanwhile the bottom two tiers are cocooning football because they don’t get significant TV money and cannot afford to throw any at testing. Whilst “we are all in it together” should be the mantra of the so-called football family, it’s hard to bet against it emerging more divided than ever into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. By supporting the finance-driven agenda of the ‘haves’ and at the same time allowing the financial vacuum for the ‘have nots’ (rather than insisting on a single football ruling) the FA - and indeed the government - are (once again) failing the national sport and promoting even greater football inequality.

I agree there is no perfect solution. However, the null and void route is the only one that is even-handed to all clubs and doesn’t require some erroneous assumptions. PPG being the worst, it’s basically the same as ending the season now but accommodates the fact that four PL clubs have played a game less. There’s nearly a quarter of the season to go - the business and of the season which traditionally results in some very unexpected results and positions. The idea that this can just be smoothed and be called integrity is false. This is the worst option to be able to call the season a ‘competition’ - which is what I would consider integrity to mean. It’s all well and good saying “but we’ve had a belting season” - this is an unprecedented global pandemic. The idea that clubs will go to the wall without TV money - which ones? Why does it not matter that L1 and L2 teams can lose crucial income but PL and CH must get theirs? If there is no provision in the EFL rules as laid out at the start of the season for a premature end then it has to be null and void. Any new vote put to clubs to amend the rules now will have an inevitable end as clubs will vote for their own interests, and there are only a few that will see themselves as turkeys at Christmas. All that said, it is understandable why the authorities was to avoid this legal minefield by finishing the season on the pitch. But even that isn’t clean because fans not being their changed the game from what it was. The big teams hugely favoured. Seems to me as though this all centres around the top clubs potentially going bust because United, Liverpool, Arsenal are more important than Bury, Bolton et al.

Which, again, is what I said. However, if L1 and the Championship end the season differently then there should be no movement of teams between the two. The integrity is lost.

I think you’ve picked a bad example with Coventry. Rotherham and Oxford could both overtake them with 9 games to play. The bookies might say different but it certainly isn’t impossible for them not to go up. The only team who deserve to go up - much as it sticks in the craw - is Liverpool. But even so, a PPG finish is completely unfair. A vote by teams doesn’t make it more fair, it just makes it agreed. But even then - 16 teams would happily vote because it would keep the status quo. The relegated teams plus maybe Wolves who might feel they can nick 5th from Man Utd and Champions League at City’s expense (assuming it happens in 2020/21). Does that make it fair on Bournemouth who would lose millions based on goal difference and who will feel they can more than stay up. Null and void is the only fair way. Give Liverpool the league title but no promotions or relegations. No team has got there. It’s not going to happen of course, BCD will happen at all costs - even at the risk of players and their families’ health.