Good News for Football Lovers - German Bundesliga season Resumes

German league the first in Europe to plan for a restart amid the pandemic! Amidst the coronavirus pandemic affecting the world population, there is good news for the sports-hungry people. With this, it becomes the first major football league to get into action again after the coronavirus pandemic. The restart is scheduled to happen this month. Germany's government and it’s federal states have given the green light to start again, with the date due to being decided. The earliest possible return date is May 15, which some clubs appeared to confirm on Wednesday, with a May 22 start also considered.

Football, a contact sport, can never adhere to any ‘social distancing’ rules over its 90 minutes of tackling and dueling, and so its German professionals will need, once they have each been passed negative for Covid-19 via regular tests, to be shielded from the rest of society. Fans will watch the Bundesliga restart only on television, and the subscription channels that hold the rights to broadcast the Germany league have been firmly guided by the government to make a portion of their matches available to non-subscribers to compensate for the fact that games will take place behind-closed-doors. The season was suspended in mid-March, when Europe began to lockdown, realizing the scale of the pandemic.

Some coaches want more time to prepare players; some want to get back into action as quickly as possible. The decision is a watershed moment, a signal that, while the global battle against coronavirus continues, the major competitive sport has a place. There are strict conditions for the Bundesliga restart. The 36 clubs who make up the top two divisions of German professional football will play in front of empty seats, with supporters barred from entering stadiums. Players, coaches, and support staff will observe a form of isolation ahead of, and during, the six to seven weeks now allocated to complete the outstanding fixtures in the 2019-20 league season, to protect against the risk of spreading infection.

Crucial to the German government’s approval were the guidelines drawn up by a special medical task force, commissioned by the DFL. Their advice is that provided clubs maintain an effective shield around the players, coaches, and technical staff, the risk of increasing national infection rates is low.

Clubs will effectively quarantine their squads - who have been training in small groups since early April, with very limited one-on-one contact - between now and the end of the season. “The lead-up to the restart must involve a degree of quarantining, like a training camp,” the task force recommends. Results from the latest round of extensive testing of players and staff for Covid-19 were also key to government approval for full training and matches. The 36 clubs reported a total of ten positive tests from more than 1700 tests - the ten are believed to be asymptomatic - and while those who tested positive have been isolated from their colleagues, the task force guidelines recommended no need to isolate any players or staff that infected individuals may have been working with.

According to numbers released by the Robert Koch Institute on Wednesday, Germany had 164,807 confirmed cases of the virus, with over 137,000 people recovered and 6,996 deaths. Elsewhere in Europe, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands have canceled their seasons, and Italy, Spain, and England are hoping for a possible June return.