English

Failed Friday meeting leaves Premier League in more uncertainty

From the Guardian, UK:

A Premier League conference that aimed to nail down the last detail ended on Friday without a satisfactory conclusion being reached. The intention  is to see the season completed, but drawing up a detailed schedule was just too difficult when “all dates are tentative”. Everyone’s dates are tentative at the moment not just football’s and one imagines the Premier League representatives knew the futility of their task before they even opened discussions.

The very idea of trying to work out a timetable a day after the government had prolonged its indefinitely extendable lockdown policy by another three weeks was optimistic at best but the current stasis is being challenged by other sports in other countries. In addition, because of the size and complexity of the financial obligations the Premier League must find a way to discharge, it was probably felt a wait-and-see policy was not an option, particularly as the likelihood of clubs losing out-of-contract players if the season goes past 30 June is a real and pressing concern.

When, inevitably, the only course that could be agreed on was to wait and see it became clearer than ever that football does not have all the answers, or indeed any of the answers. Perhaps we should already have known that given the number of U-turns over the problem of staff furloughing in the past few weeks.