S9: Return of Sorts

12th March.

That was my last blog. It was an example of me being organised and preparing for the weekend - I was aware of the uncertainty ahead, and discussed the possibility of football being held behind closed doors in the future, or even postponed.

It's a salutary lesson to young aspiring football prediction game runners out there that organisation is your worst enemy. Phone it in. Be last minute. Churn out whatever guff your consumers will lap up. Minimal effort for minimal benefit. That's the maxim for life.

Because only THIRTY FOUR MINUTES after the blog was posted, the news broke...

Absolutely infuriating. Made me look like one of those eedjit ITKs on Twitter saying their best mate's son's dog walker's girlfriend saw a certain ginger-bearded Argentine buying a Brie & Grape baguette at the Upper Crust concession at Birmingham New Street station so oy oy get down to the Holte End sharpish with your newly printed shirt and your favourite recreational silicone toy because things are about to get MESSI <eyes emoji ad nauseum>

You only have but one reputation and San Mikel has gone and buggered mine.

There is an argument that given the number of deaths attributed to the Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid game the day before, and the subsequent regional spike attributed to the Gold Cup at Cheltenham, Mik saved lives. Which only boosts my Arteta love to a 5. I forgive you all your transgressions

So football was postponed, starting with that weekend's fixtures. It's now been 3 months without any football (Bundesliga doesn't count you hippies). Even if you discount international football, which I strongly do, it's been the longest period any of us have gone without football since we gained sporting consciousness. I don't know the upper margin of everyone playing Impossibiliteee, but I'm making the assumption that nobody here was collecting Panini stickers for the 1939-1940 1st Division season...

It was obviously the right thing to do. Have I missed it? Nope. Not even a tiny bit. My bandwidth has been utilised, and even exceeded with other things. I usually enjoy my summer break from football, dipping in with some podcasts but enjoying liberty from the schedule, and this has been that, but with the added benefit of endlessly mocking Scousers for the reverence with which they hold former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Premier League manager Bill Shankly. Perspective well and truly gained for many of us.

What about the return? Well I've made no great secret of my opposition to the league restarting. I make my case on 3 pillars:

• Sporting
• Health
• Economic

Let's deal with the easy one first. Any talk of sporting integrity can go and take a running jump into a Costa Rican island lake containing the reanimated incarnation of the Late Cretaceous period's most fearsome aquatic predator

What integrity? Any momentum has evaporated. The Home/Away advantage reduced if not removed. Fitness and squad management changes - players out for the season now returned and fit, whilst the rest of the squad levels drop. They've literally changed the laws of the game - allowing an additional 2 subs. Contracts and loans - what a mess that is...This is a new mini-tournament, and is in no way a genuine end to the 2019-2020 season. Whatever happens, asterisks will abound. Liverpool's title is going to have a teeny tiny asterisk, but the CL places, relegation and so on will be forever controversial.

Now that doesn't mean that any of the other options were any better from an integrity purpose - null & voiding the league 75% of the way through seems brutal, stopping play and finalising the table based on current position or points-per-game also have their huge downsides - but my point here is that the idea of integrity should not come into play when we talk about completing the season. Beautifully illustrated by the decision to end the season in the WSL, League One and Two and so on. If sporting integrity was imperative, these competitions would be continuing too.

Health wise - my concern is one of unnecessary risk. What is the likelihood of a very fit athlete, or comparatively very fit coach etc getting seriously ill, or dying? Pretty small. But what about all the other cogs that go into restarts - the backroom staff, the team getting the ground sorted and the demands on public services - police and paramedics still need to be assigned, even with no fans. Why are journalists needed to come to matches - famously in shape as many of them are...

What if say Jamie Vardy gets COVID, and takes out 4 teammates and Leicester drop from a deserved Champions League place to 5th or 6th? Touches back to my integrity issue there. Of greater likelihood, as seen in Germany, is the drastic increase in muscle and ligament injuries because of the destruction of any elite level fitness - 10 weeks on an elliptical trainer whilst watching The Last Dance might get you beach body ready but doesn't replicate 90 minutes of Premier League football. So a ruptured ACL here, for no real benefit to anyone, could derail a career. Players are now being asked to play an extended Christmas fixture list, with now proper warm up or recovery period.

There's talk about the boost to the nation's mental health to have some football on TV. Forgive me for my insensitivity, but that can't be the national fillip hoped for when we're by basically any metric, one of the worst countries in the world at dealing with the pandemic, which of course is placed in the context of over a decade of economic instability, huge political turmoil both domestically and abroad and social divisions riven across generational, geographical and social lines now rapidly fracturing into crevasses.

But yeah, watching Andriy Yarmolenko spank a ball into an empty row Z and hearing the echo of a plastic chair rattling reverberating around the cavernous Olympic Stadium is for sure going to give me the pick-me-up I need right now.

So to my mind, this is a purely economic argument. Now I don't purport to have a PhD in economics, nor really understand anything in the Financial Times but I have listened to the Freakonomics podcast, started Economics for Dummies over the lockdown and got in on the ground floor beofre the Sky Digital boom in the early Noughties, so my CV should at least get me shortlisted for the next Chair of the IMF.

Let's be honest. He who pays the piper, calls the tune, and in this case, Sky & BT Sport have locked out the jukebox. Pretty sure that's how the metaphor goes. The Premier League is nowhere near the size industry it likes to think it is BUT we're still talking a several billion pound sector which directly or indirectly employs thousands of people. How many of these people could be redirected into similar fields is academic in the short term - data analysts, sports scientists,  retail staff and so on might be able to find new work but won't currently and the government schemes are limited in scope, by political design and economic necessity. Now isn't the time to go into my anarcho-communist rant about how money is all pretend anyway, so we'll take as read that people got billz to pay and leave it there, until the revolution comes. Income streams across most Premier league clubs are heavily biased towards TV money when compared to matchday/sporting revenue or commercial sponsorship deals, and both these areas have taken huge hits, so clubs are reliant on not rebating that lovely TV lucre to, in some cases, literally keeping the lights on.

I do think it's slightly overblown - TV companies go too hard and they kill the goose that had laid their golden eggs but ultimately the threat outweighs any real objections clubs have because their raison d'etre now is to play football AND make money. Global game, global business and all that. Would I be adverse to a reorienting of the sport back to a more local horizon? Nope - I'm not advocating a return to the 1920s of 11 local lads with hobnail boots, but a middle ground of elite sport rooted in local communities, run on not-for-profit models where big money can be spent, but used to boost local sport, community organisations and so on - would that be a bad thing? Lower ticket prices, lower (although still enormous) wages, less banal razzmatazz? I sound very old and ludditey, but I think we've jumped the shark, and Coronavirus has provided us with an opportunity to blow it all up and think about what's dear to us as football fans, and hand-on-heart, even if Arsenal win all their remaining games and sneak 4th and win the FA Cup, I think I'd struggle to genuinely get up for this in the way I would have done 3 months ago.

Bookmark this page and make me eat my words in a few months' time.

So what's going to happen here? Firstly, none of my above issues with restarting the football are applicable to this game - so if they start, so do we. Any M30 predictions already entered will be cancelled and we'll do a redo of that round.  I'm looking at the fixtures list and I'll probably put up 3 matchdays at a time as the games come pretty thick and fast, starting on Friday 19th June.

Results posts will be done infrequently to keep everyone updated and we'll keep the FA Cup game going too. If you're not in the Impossibilitee WhatsApp group (strictly business) and want to join, let me know - it'll likely be the fastest and most agile way to stay up to date. 

I hope you've all been well over lockdown and continue to stay safe. Check back next week for the predictions blog. And remember: