While Italy is gradually emerging from the lockdown, with all the necessary precautions and with the prospect of an unprecedented economic crisis, a great dilemma has been accompanying the public debate in recent weeks: Should football, and more generally sport, restart or not? The Serie A season must inevitably be completed, as Alla would like Lega Serie A (which has set the hypothetical restart on 13 June) and to many fans, whether it's to bring home a trophy or to really savor the return to normality (what does the lives of millions of Italians do if not football?), or is it better to resign yourself to the idea of ending it here, assuming at the maximum of playing the European cups in August, as UEFA would like, to then start again seriously and safely in the autumn?
“On the reopening of the championship: if it resumes it will be because we will arrive at an orderly succession of protocols that will ensure security for everything and everyone”, said the Minister of Sport Vincenzo Spadafora in the report to the Senate on Wednesday, reiterating a position already known: for the moment there is no talk of it and it is not possible to establish today if and when it will be possible to play the last 12 championship days and possibly also the Italian Cup. The only certainty is that, if it is resumed, it will in any case be behind closed doors, and this in itself does not go down well with fans, season-ticket holders and the "romantic" of sport in general, those for whom a show without an audience loses a large part of its meaning.
However, the important thing is health, we all know it and even the presidents themselves admit it. Even those who insist on playing, such as Lazio's number one (second at 1 point from Juve, with the possibility of fighting for the title) Claudio Lotito, who believes that the conditions are there: "The Technical-Scientific Committee - he said - wanted to hear the voice of the football doctor who lives on the pitch and doesn't live behind a desk. He lives where there is no pure science but there is evidence based medicine, which runs parallel to scientific medicine. Medicine is not a science; medicine is an art. Unfortunately, a degree is not enough to be an artist. Otherwise we would find everything in the books. Is the Coronavirus dying? In my opinion, yes".
Beyond partisan interests (and interpretations), what should we do? On the one hand, as mentioned, there is the primary need to protect everyone's health, including the players themselves (at the time of writing, there are still some positives and in France a player has ended up in a coma), who, moreover, are the first to express doubts. On the other hand, however, the insistence on returning to the field is not just a whim of this club that will have to give up this trophy or this goal. It's a matter of survival: the bimonthly installment from 2 May expired 225 million euros in television rights. The largest share is by Sky, followed by Dazn and Img. Sky is also the broadcaster deployed on the line of maximum intransigence: it has decided not to pay its share, going to the clash with the Serie A League. Satellite TV has signed up for 266 games out of 380, and demands that all 266 be played.
The money that would be missing is vital for almost all clubs, excluding super powers such as Juventus, Inter and Milan itself, even if it is in trouble in its technical reconstruction. For all the others (not to mention Serie B and Lega Pro, where dozens of bankruptcies are expected) the risk of collapse or drastic downsizing is real. That's why, despite some teams stopping everything would save themselves prematurely from relegation, when it came to voting for the restart, the yes won unanimously: twenty out of twenty. Also relegation therefore, for some, is better than bankruptcy. Alternatively, the hypothesis of closing quickly with a playoff mini-tournament has been discussed, but even in this case the televisions would not pay.
Finally, to satisfy the small teams, a block on relegations was thought of with an expansion of Serie A 22 only for next season, while the European (Uefa) and international (Fifa) federations have made it clear that if the championship cannot be concluded by 2 August, when the current European cups should be completed and the list of participants in the next ones will have to be formalised, the last ranking available will have value, in homage to the prevalence of sporting merit. With all due respect to Lotito and the "repartisti".
