Football news - The Warm-Up: English football is here to help

Some positive news from Crystal Palace. Chairman Steve Parish has announced that none of the club’s full-time employees will lose pay if they have to take leave as a result of the coronavirus. This announcement follows Brighton’s undertaking to do the same.

Further, none of Palace’s “matchday casual” staff will be left “disadvantaged financially” if games have to be cancelled or played behind closed doors. Interestingly, Parish goes on to say that “we are not anticipating this to be the case”, which suggests a certain official optimism as to the season getting done. At some point.

One impact of the coronavirus crisis on football will be to expose which clubs have the resources to absorb a shutdown like this, and which do not, but instead rely on week-to-week income from matchdays. We’d expect more Premier League clubs to follow Palace’s lead; equally, we’d expect more clubs lower down the league to be placed in some frankly miserable positions.

Already Barnet, marooned just outside the National League playoff spots, have placed all non-playing staff on notice of redundancy as “emergency measures to preserve the club”. Without outside help, more will follow, and the Athletic (£) are reporting that the National League will be asking the FA “a £17 million lifeline”. We’re about to learn just how shaky this whole pyramid is.

As a potential counter-measure to some of the fears above, the Football League has announced a £50m “short-term relief fund” to assist clubs in the Championship, League One, and League Two. The money is composed partly of award payments to be handed out early, and partly interest-free loans.

The EFL’s statement emphasises that their “primary objective, in order to protect competition integrity, is to deliver a successful conclusion to the 2019/20 season”. However, an early decision has been made to postpone the Leasing.com Trophy Final, which was scheduled for Sunday April 5, just a couple of days after the proposed restart.

The EFL explain that they did not want to find themselves “in a position whereby many thousands of supporters are forced to change their plans at late notice”. Reading between the lines, we can perhaps conclude that they are not feeling confident about a return to action on April 3. Fans of Portsmouth and Salford City might have a long wait in prospect.

The Warm-Up doesn’t own any hotels. We’re terrible at Monopoly. But if we did, we hope we’d be following the lead set by Gary Neville and Roman Abramovich and throwing the doors open to NHS staff.

Neville, who co-owns two hotels with Ryan Giggs, is to shut them both down for ordinary commercial use but keep the staff working and offer them, free of charge, to NHS workers and medical professionals from around Manchester. In the video above Neville, who appears to be lost inside an Anglican church, calls on the hotel industry as a whole to show “solidarity” with both their staff and with the health services.

Earlier in the week, down in London, Chelsea announced that NHS staff working in the north-west of London will be able to use the Millennium Hotel at Stamford Bridge as a base for at least the next two months. Abramovich is footing the bill, and the North West London Clinical Commissioning Group told the BBC they were “enormously grateful”.

However much time you’ve got for Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s schtick in normal circumstances, it’s nice to see him putting it to work to raise a million euros for Italian hospitals. Even if we suspect that the coronavirus cannot, in fact, be kicked into submission. Even by a lion.

On this day in 1924, Joe Gaetjens was born in Haiti. 26 and a bit years after that, under the flag of the USA, he scored the only goal in one of the World Cup’s greatest shocks, as America’s amateurs toppled the mighty England 1-0 at the 1950 World Cup. And didn’t the USA’s kit have a lovely sash?

Over on the Guardian, John Brewin talks us through his favourite game: that semi-final between Uruguay and Ghana, in 2010. We particularly enjoyed this insight into the cut-throat world of football journalism: