Never before has a Bundesliga day crystallized attention. The German championship, the first major football competition to restart on Saturday 16 May, must prove to the world that professional sport can live with the coronavirus. But the traps are numerous and the certainties rare.

At 3.30 p.m. local time on Saturday, the first five games of this new era in football history will kick off simultaneously in five stadiums empty of spectators. They will have been preceded, at 1 p.m., by other matches involving second division clubs.

Many countries including Italy, Spain and England, the other three major championships which plan to resume before the summer, will scrutinize with hope but also apprehension the German experience. Failure would seriously jeopardize their own chances of convincing their governments to give them the green light.

A historical spotlight

The poster for this 26th day pits Borussia Dortmund, second in the ranking, with his neighbor Schalke, in the very prestigious "Ruhr derby", behind closed doors for the first time in history. The leader Bayern Munich and his stars will hit the track Sunday at 6 p.m. in Berlin, on the Union lawn.

What feast football fans around the world weaned from the ball since early March. "If the Bundesliga is the only championship broadcast on TV in the world, I suppose we will count viewers by the billions," enthuses Bayern Munich boss Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who sees it as a great promotion.

"I can guarantee you that for 20 years I have never felt this (public) interest in the Bundesliga," Adolfo Barbero, commentator on the Spanish channel Movistar + and expert in German football, told AFP this week.

In camera and social distancing

However, Saturday's show promises to be strange, in the silence and the agonizing echo of the deserted speakers. Players on the lawn will no longer be allowed to kiss to celebrate their goals. Substitutes and coaches will wear masks and all the friendly pre-match protocol, accompaniment by children, handshakes, photos and pennant exchanges will be eliminated.

Even the actors will have to watch themselves, all their words are now heard by viewers. "I will try to speak to myself and behave in a socially acceptable manner," admitted the boisterous Leipzig coach Julian Nagelsmann, worried about letting go of some of these swearwords who usually get lost in the crash of the stadium.

Why then, ask certain "ultras" supporters, to resume in these conditions which kill everything that makes the charm of football? The German Football League has never hidden it, it is to save an economic sector stricken by the cessation of competitions. By playing the last nine days of the season, the clubs will recover 300 million euros in TV rights, which will allow several of them to avoid bankruptcy.

The stated objective is to complete the championship on June 27. But the League does not rule out having to extend in July, if some clubs were victims of massive contamination with coronavirus and forced to quarantine for 14 days.

More than half of Germans opposed to the takeover

For the moment, only one club is in this situation, Dynamo Dresden in the second division. In the first division, several cases of contamination have been made public and those affected placed in solitary confinement, but all the teams continue to train on the basis of tests carried out regularly.

This recovery, which raises immense hope in the world of football, is not unanimous in Germany. As of Friday morning, the public broadcaster ARD reported a poll indicating that 56% of Germans were against it. The reflection of a skepticism propagated by certain doctors or politicians.

Because the risks are not minor. For the players first: some damage caused by a pulmonary infection "can be irreversible", even causing the end of the career of a high-level sportsman, argues doctor Wilhelm Bloch, doctor at the École supérieure du sport de Cologne.

Strict quarantine

To limit the risks, the clubs are subjected to draconian sanitary measures and the teams were forced to isolate themselves from the rest of the world this week. On Thursday, Augsburg coach Heiko Herrlich was kicked out of the group for going out to buy toothpaste in violation of quarantine rules. He will not be allowed to enter the stadium on Saturday.

Another concern concerns the attitude of supporters, who might be tempted to gather in the hundreds around the stadiums, or to ignore the cautions by massing in bars to follow the matches.

With AFP

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