Chelsea: Football fans may get the “nuclear option” they deserve

Football fans, including Chelsea fans at times, are rarely sympathetic figures. As the 2019/20 season hurdles towards an anticlimax they may be getting what they deserve.

Quarantine policy in England can be summed up as “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” From the police to the local Council of Karens to the latest government proclamations, every minor infraction by a citizen is met with a Seymour Skinner-esque threat to double the detention. As football slowly staggers its way towards an approximation of normalcy, Constable Skinner is standing athwart, saying “No! The beatings will continue!”

According to The Telegraph, the senior football police officer is threatening the “nuclear option” of ending the season if, upon its resumption, fans congregate outside the closed-door stadiums on matchdays. In fact, just to prove that I wasn’t exaggerating for effect in the paragraph above, The Telegraph quotes the SFPO saying “[I]f fans don’t abide by the restrictions then the league can be curtailed… [T]he more you abide by the restrictions, the easier it makes it to fulfill the season.”

Well.

For starters, the ideas of a mass gathering of fans breaking quarantine to rally outside a stadium imputes far more gumption and independence to HM’s loyal subjects than we have seen any indication of to date. If the Derby drone unit (not the one involving Marcelo Bielsa) did not stir a public reaction, it’s hard to see what a Chelsea or Liverpool or, well, Derby County game would do.

But if fans were to come out for their team against police orders, it might just be too little, too late.

When you allow things to reach the point of having a senior football police officer, it’s no longer your game or the players’ game or the league’s game. It’s not the people’s game nor the rich man’s game. If the senior football police officer can unilaterally pull the plug on the season, it’s his game. Not even the owners’ game, not even with and for all their money.

Would the fans, teams and leagues be any more outraged by a police-induced shutdown than they have been with their treatment over the last seven weeks? Would the clubs and leagues side with the senior football police officer against their own fans? If so, would that create a rift between club administration and membership? Or would everyone agree that morale clearly didn’t improve, and therefore the beatings will justifiably continue.

As an aside, if the police were to shut down the season, how would that affect the broadcast contracts? Could this be a loophole: if the league cancels the season it’s an abrogation requiring a full refund of media rights fees, but if the police cancel the season is it a new form of force majeure? An Act of God for a society that has rendered everything, even football, unto Caesar?

Football fans have ceded their game along with everything else, and now must hope they can grovel on the proper terms to enjoy the scraps thrown to them.

Just as people get the government they deserve, institutions get the governance they deserve. The two are overlapping far more than anyone should be comfortable with. The results – like everything from Chelsea’s 2018/19 season to the entire trajectory of the coronafright – are entirely foreseeable when they are not flat-out predictable.

Remember all this the next time someone says “it’s just sports,” “only a game” or “not really important.” As in sport, so in life.