The last time English professional football got going again after a suspension was in August 1946, the great game hungrily welcomed by a traumatised population desperate to recover normal life following the horrors of the second world war. The Football League’s marvellous centenary history, written by the great commentator Bryon Butler in 1988 – four years before the First Division clubs broke away from that heritage to form the Premier League – describes the restart as, simply, “Boom Years”.
Crowds flocked back to roar on football’s return, producing the record season’s aggregate of 41 million for all four divisions in 1948-49, the campaign Portsmouth won the First Division, five points clear of Matt Busby’s first fine Manchester United team. Many of the grounds that had mostly lain empty for seven years were of course not well equipped to cope with the resurgence, and 33 people were killed in a terrible crush when Bolton Wanderers hosted Stoke City for an FA Cup tie at Burnden Park in March 1946, before the league had resumed.
However relentlessly Boris Johnson and his ministers feel compelled to mention the war, the coronavirus pandemic that has resulted in 63,000 excess deaths so far is very different from 1939-45 – and football’s return is eerily so. The image of “the people’s game” in the late 40s, forever imprinted by black and white photographs of gladdened crowds on steepling terraces, will be replaced in 2020 with empty stadiums. The effect of playing without fans makes for haunting television, seen first at Bundesliga matches, which restarted earlier because Germany’s government has responded much more effectively to the virus than Britain’s, experiencing 8,500 excess deaths in the country.
Johnson’s government has had an odd, jarring approach to the game throughout, beginning, as Covid-19 was spreading exponentially, with telling the Premier League and EFL that they were fine to carry on with all fixtures over the weekend of 14‑15 March. The advice at the time, still provided as its explanation, was given by Johnson on 16 March: “The risks of transmission [of the coronavirus] at mass gatherings such as sporting events are relatively low.”
The leagues were preparing to follow that advice, with matches going ahead and thousands of people travelling all over the country to attend, until Mikel Arteta and several players contracted the virus. One senior football figure told the Guardian at the time they actually feared they might “get a bollocking” from ministers for going against government advice to play on in the pandemic.
Even now, it does not accept that this advice about gatherings carrying low risk of transmission was wrong, and that its view has since clearly been reversed. The department of health and social care (DHSC) still provides this explanation, even though no supporters will be allowed at matches, and there are health concerns about a few people assembling outside grounds without physical distancing. On Saturday, as the government was discouraging people from going out to demonstrate, Downing Street issued guidance that “coronavirus thrives on mass gatherings”. It is impossible to see how that can be squared with the previous advice about “relatively low risk”.
The facts are that ministers advised the football authorities and supporters that it was acceptable for 54,000 people to gather at Anfield to watch Liverpool play Atlético Madrid on 11 March, and for crowds to watch that weekend’s fixtures, but now no more than six people are allowed to gather together anywhere, and they must keep two metres apart. The DHSC guidance explains that this is “making sure that the risk of transmission remains limited”.
The culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, began football’s lockdown period by criticising clubs using his own government’s furlough scheme – for which they qualified, according to the Treasury criteria – and the health secretary, Matt Hancock, told players to take pay cuts, which he implied was somehow their duty because of “the sacrifices” of doctors and nurses dying from Covid-19 contracted in hospitals. As the death toll rose but the government sought a return to normality, Dowden and Johnson then talked of wanting the Premier League to resume “as soon as possible” because, Johnson said, it could “provide a much-needed boost to national morale”.
The shutdown is ending – unlike in 1946, only the top two divisions are restarting, due to football’s modern inequalities – and one Premier League player, Marcus Rashford, strongly criticised Johnson’s government for consigning millions of people to poverty so grim they may not have enough to eat. Johnson was forced into a U-turn by the publicity from the striker’s devastating open letter, which detailed that 5.2 million children are expected to be living in poverty by 2022, and that 45% of children in black and minority ethnic groups are in poverty.
As the Manchester United player put it: “This is England in 2020 …”
