The Warm-Up: UEFA has big plans for the summer
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Updated 23/04/2020 at 15:05 GMT
Finish off the entire Champions League and Europa League in a month? Hell yes!
Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold of Liverpool lifting the UEFA Champions League trophy the UEFA Champions League Final between Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool at Estadio Wanda Metropolitano on June 01, 2019
Image credit: Getty Images
THURSDAY’S BIG STORIES
Summer camp!
It struck the Warm-Up today that following the various plans for football’s restart is occupying exactly the space that transfer rumours usually would. Lots of hypotheticals, lots of breezy discussion about which would make the most sense, lots of “understands” and movement that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
And, of course, lots of attempts to rationalise “what would be best for my club” as “what would be best for everybody”. Of course, young starlet Conclude Average-Points should move to Liverpool. They’d develop nicely under Jurgen Klopp.
We realised this when we read that UEFA were considering cramming the rest of the Europa League and Champions League into August, and got the same giddy rush we used to get when we were younger and Raúl was definitely moving to Manchester United, or whatever. A World Cup but it’s all the club sides! Games every day! Some football! Please, some football!
And then the cold light of rationality crept back in and the Warm-Up knew, just as the Warm-Up knew every time this or that swap deal appeared on the back pages, that this was an exercise in hope. Maybe everybody involved wants this to happen. But even though hope expands to fill available space, things don’t get any more possible. And there is a lot of space right now.
Do UEFA want to get together teams from a number of different countries, with a number of different pandemic policies, and rub them up against each other for a month? Sure. Of course. So would everybody else. But will they? Ummmmmm.
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Letting the riff-raff back in
It’s easy to forget, all these years and noise and nonsense later, but the Premier League started from a simple question: what if football clubs made people pay to watch top flight football on television, and kept the money? What would happen then?
The answer to this question has brought us, well, everything we know and love, or at least now just about tolerate despite the obvious moral horror of the entire business. And it all sprang from this simple idea, this one transaction introduced where no transaction had been. The Premier League needs the paywall like an ostler needs his … ostle.
But not now. When the Premier League returns — and nobody really knows when that might be — then it may return on free-to-air television. At least if the government gets its way: Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden reckons that the step might be necessary to prevent people gathering wherever a Sky subscription can be found.
Not to mention, it would be a pretty terrible look. The Premier League is back! Normality is returning! And no, you can’t go to the pub, or go to a friend’s house. Pay up or lump it. (Or listen to it, or follow the game by the screams of your next-door neighbour.) Tell you what, the suggestion that the top flight should be free-to-air for the good of society does rather bring out how anti-social, in a literal sense, the whole move was in the first place.
Ta-ra, Phil Neville
It is almost a month and a half since England limped out of the SheBelieves Cup with a 1-0 loss to Spain. It feels like it’s been, what a couple of years, but no. March 12. It’s still April. It has always been April. Imagine how long May’s going to be.
Slightly longer for Phil Neville, perhaps. England Women’s manager is expected to step down today after a miserable run of form: since losing the World Cup third-place play-off to Sweden they’ve won just three games out of nine, and have looked utterly shambolic at the back. He was supposed to be going after the Euros in 2021, but since it looks like the tournament might be bumped back to 2022 at the earliest, his moment has come now.
And to think, it was just a few short months ago (long months! years!) that Neville was calling himself the bravest and bestest coach in the world.
I have a vision that nobody else has. I’ve got bravery that no other coach has probably had. So, do you know what? Thank your lucky stars. I’m here. I’m here to stay. And I’m going to continue to keep improving. I’ve got a long way to go but I think with the set of players we’ve got and with my philosophy, I think we can go a long way. I live and breathe it, and I never have a bad day.
How quickly (slowly! oh so slowly!) things can change.
Still, it’s probably not a terrible time for any team to be switching manager. There may not be any actual football, but that just means no awkward results to get in the way of all the thinking, planning, and strategising. Imagine the Powerpoint presentations we’ll be getting at the end of this. It's going to be tremendous.
IN OTHER NEWS
Obviously this isn’t recent: the people are outside, they are sitting next to each other, it must be from the Before Times. But it drifted across our Twitter feed today and, well, bloody hell.
RETRO CORNER
It’s Kaká’s birthday! Happy birthday Kaká. There’s a nice article over on the BBC from their Noughty Boys series, or you could just watch nearly 20 minutes of Youtube deliciousness here. What a player he was. Somehow he got faster when he picked up the ball, which doesn’t seem like it should be allowed.
HAT TIP
Over on the i, Daniel Storey looks back at the life of Lily Parr, who was so good at football that the FA banned her and all other English women from playing it.
In December 1921, the announcement finally came. “The game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged,” a FA statement read. Women were banned from playing or training on any professional pitch, banned from playing official opposition and banned from using FA-registered referees and officials. Two years after it began, Parr’s semi-professional career was over.
COMING UP
As lockdown bites, the words we use to mark time become increasingly meaningless. All days become Daydays, one much the same as the next. Except tomorrow, which is Tom Adams Day.
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