Chelsea once lost Eden Hazard for a few months because he stumbled and broke a bone in his foot walking off a practice pitch while on international duty. Football’s governing bodies should ban such injuries if they want to keep players safe.
In case it was ever anything but, the coronavirus pandemic has now reached the stage of moral panic. Over the last 24 hours, The Telegraph has had three articles about how football or other sports should end the “scourge” of spitting. Sky Sports’ Kaveh Solhekol reports today on proposals to disinfect the balls and the pitch before games, along – it goes without saying – all the seats that have gone and will remain unfilled and have been exposed to little more than outdoor air and ultraviolet radiation for the last month.
These measures – plus those implemented in Germany for the progressive return to training – are all in the name of player safety and preventing the spread of contagion. They raise a pertinent question, though: if absolute safety is the overriding concern before football can return, why doesn’t football – why hasn’t football, in fact, why haven’t all sports – ban injuries?
Chelsea have been part of two of the most devastating head injuries of the Premier League era. Chelsea’s Petr Cech and Hull City’s Ryan Mason nearly died on the pitch because of impacts to their heads. Mason’s injury was so severe it ended his career.
Other less critical injuries are far more common. Kurt Zouma tore his anterior cruciate ligament while landing from a corner kick. Ruben Loftus-Cheek reinjured his Achilles on the Major League Soccer-grade turf of the New England Revolution’s stadium. Jamal Blackman fractured his tibia while on loan at Sheffield United, playing with the U23’s, of all things. Reece James broke his ankle on international duty with England’s U20’s.
If you didn’t know better, you’d begin to think that, contra American banter, football is a contact sport; and, like every other contact sport, carries a degree of physical risk to it.
Of course, golf and tennis are non-contact sports and those players get injured. Track & field athletes social distance by nature and profession, and they’re seemingly always injured. Then there was that track runner who stumbled over his own dog inside his house and tore his hamstring at the origin.
Football’s authorities are not insensitive to the risks of the game. There is a serious discussion about banning or limiting headers at the youth level, given the risk of concussions and damage to the developing brain from impact with the ball, let alone the occasional impact with another head. Those conversations require weighing the medical and physical risks against the imperative to develop players for the professional game. As we discussed earlier today, you can only get so much benefit from quasi-football before you have to make the discontinuous leap to real football, and hope the transference gets close to 100%.
But giving consideration to those risks also means accepting a certain amount of them.
Eventually, football will set limits – grounded in some data but ultimately arbitrary – about the number of headers a player can take per game and per week for a certain age, and then progress that number until – at some age – they can undertake unrestricted headers.
And then, on some player’s first game with unrestricted headers he will go up for an aerial duel against a player retiring the next week, their heads will collide, and one will be concussed and the other will walk away. That’s football, that’s life, that’s why football is life: sometimes it’s cruel, arbitrary and nonsensical.
Governing bodies and clubs have a responsibility to mitigate, if not minimize, the risks their players face. It’s why tackles that were commonplace 30 years ago would be straight red cards with an additional suspension today. But even a clean tackle can lead to an injury, and sometimes you don’t even need that much contact for a player to miss two months and perhaps never be the same.
Mitigating the risks means understanding the risks.
Is there any basis to believe that sanitizing balls and pitches reduces the risk of coronavirus? If banning spitting is deemed necessary to protect the players from airborne bodily fluids, will players be required to wear head bands to ensure their sweat does not fly onto someone else? Will the Premier League order their kit suppliers to develop two-sided ultra-wicking-on-one-side repellant-on-the-other textiles so that your sweat never leaves your body, but if somehow it does it can’t come in contact with someone else’s body?
If headbands are judged too much of an interference with the necessary act of heading and the two-sided fabric won’t be available for three more years, what about face masks? Why not face masks? Chelsea players have a history of performing well with their Zorro masks. Maybe facemasks will make them even better. Well, as long as they avoid this.
Risk is part of the game and part of life. The risks of sport have increased as players have become stronger and faster – impacts are harder, the stresses on muscles and bones are greater, the effects of the lengthening schedule are deeper. Football clubs and players make informed judgments and accept it everyday. Right now, judgments are everything but informed. The governing bodies and leagues are not trying to manage risk, they are trying to eliminate it – or at least give the impression that they are. The former is futile, the latter is despicable.
Besides, if they really wanted to minimize risk to players’ well-being, they’d reduce the number of games in a season.
If leagues and governing bodies are not willing to accept some risk, then they are in the wrong business. And if they think sanitation theatre sends the message that they care, they think as little of you and their players as we suspect.