This doesn’t exactly make for promising reading does it?
Whilst there has been plenty of talk about how the football season is going to resume, with the belief being that it will have to be played behind closed doors. However, there hasn’t been much of a timetable put in place for when fans will be allowed back into stadiums. According to one man though, there could be a long wait for that.
Speaking in an interview with The Times, Dr Zach Binney gave his view on when he believed that fans would be able to attend games once again, stating that we could potentially have to wait until the 2021/22 season before that happens:
“The thing that people need to understand, epidemiologically speaking, is that every person you add to a gathering adds risk. Five people is more dangerous than two, ten is more dangerous than five, 500 is more dangerous than ten, 60,000 is very, very dangerous. The best guess is about 18 months, could be a little more, could be a little less.”
Whilst obviously football is very much not the important thing during all of this, I do fear that if this is indeed the case, then clubs are going to have to be very creative and very careful with how they go about it.
There has already been reports of clubs in fear of going out of business without the gate receipts, and if this is going to effect next season in the same way, then clubs are going to be in serious trouble unless something is done about it.
Whether that means yet another cash advance from the top tiers, or making the iFollow service more widely available so fans can essentially pay for their season tickets through streaming, something is going to have to give otherwise there could be serious trouble ahead. With a large portion of Birmingham City’s revenues coming from gate receipts, the Blues could very well be in that sort of situation themselves.
That is of course if we get that far, which hopefully we won’t.