Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has called on the powers at be NOT to ban football fans from attending matches.
Football had to endure life without fans for the best part of a year after the coronavirus pandemic gripped the world.
While we were thankful still to be able to watch it on the tele, it wasn’t the same, with manufactured crowd noise difficult to stomach.
Unfortunately, with the Omicron variant spawning a new wave of coronavirus infections around the United Kingdom, there are fears that new lockdown restrictions will be imposed after Christmas.
If that were to be the case, it’s hard to imagine tens of thousands of fans being allowed to attend football stadiums on a weekly basis.
Some see it as a foregone conclusion that the turnstiles are going to be forced to stop turning, again, but Mikel Arteta has begged the authorities not to let it happen.
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Quoted by the Daily Mail, Arteta said: “Please don’t go back to that stage. We have experienced that and it’s something we don’t like so hopefully it’s not what happens.”
“It’s a different sport. Football is all about sharing it with people and having fans around the stadiums and when it is not, it is a completely different sport and the competition gets lost. It is not the same.”
For some, football is everything. That sense of belonging and community is a necessary distraction from all that’s wrong in life. It will be a huge miss for many, should the doors shut again.
It also, as Arteta says, completely changes the competitiveness of each and every fixture. It’s not football without fans in the grounds – period.
