In his last days as managing director of the German Football League, Christian Seifert succeeded again in what he mostly succeeded in his first 16 years: he presented a decent number. Eighty-six. So many players from the first and second Bundesliga, he told the “SZ” in November, have not yet been vaccinated. And because he rightly considers this to be a decent number with more than 1000 players, he could not and did not want to resist a question to the politicians who are diligently demanding that football professionals be vaccinated medicine or for teachers, but now the officials in the health and labor ministries are to deal with whether a law for 86 people will be drafted? ”A hit for Seifert!
The last first round match day of the Bundesliga will be played this weekend. And since no game has been canceled this season and Joshua Kimmich now wants to be vaccinated, you should look out of the Bundesliga stadiums as soon as possible in the debate about corona and sport. To the rest of the republic, where athletes and clubs fear for their livelihood again. To the rest of Europe, where even the most powerful league cannot protect itself. And of course to the rest of the world, where the strong and, as always, the weak suffer.
In the second winter of the pandemic, there seems to be a game changer for top international sport: Omikron. The latest escalation could be traced back to the latest Corona variant. In the English Premier League at least six out of ten games were canceled due to Covid-19 outbreaks at the weekend - including the Manchester United encounter. Most recently it was said that more than 40 professionals in England have tested positive. So many athletes were hit in the American leagues NBA and NFL that it takes almost an entire page of newspaper to list them. And those are just the countries and leagues where a majority of people have been able to get a vaccine for protection.
However, it is not enough to examine developments in the Bundesliga, Premier League, NBA, NFL and wherever in isolation.
You can and should classify them in the national context - and then you have to put them in the international one.
That is where the greatest risk lurks.
All you have to do is look at the calendar for the next year.
What about the qualifying matches for the soccer World Cup, in which primarily the nations from Africa, Asia and South America, where the vaccine is still missing, have to compete?
Many such examples could be named.
Instead, one should remember something fundamental about this pandemic in December 2021, which does not only apply to top-class sport: In our world, dealing with the virus is not just a national problem, but a global one.