Some relaxation
During the short winter break, numerous professionals brought Corona with them from their vacation and first had to be quarantined. That is now over for many. At RB Leipzig, for example, Dani Olmo, Benjamin Henrichs and Solomon Bonnah are back in training after surviving the infection.
Those responsible for the national league hope that the number of cases will decrease again after the players are now back in the daily training and league routine with the prescribed hygiene measures. But there are always new cases like the last one at Bayer Leverkusen with Paulinho and Niklas Lomb.
New quarantine rules
It helps the clubs that the federal and state governments have shortened quarantine and isolation times. There is no risk of a team being paralyzed by mass isolation. Anyone who has been boosted, has been newly vaccinated twice or has just recovered (not more than three months ago) does not have to be in quarantine if they have had contact with someone infected with Omicron. The quarantine for infected people has been shortened from 14 to ten days, after seven days a free test is possible.
However, it is still unclear when the rules will come into force.
Requirements for game withdrawals
Bayern Munich’s chairman of the board, Oliver Kahn, called for a revision of the game rules because injured and banned people are not counted among the failures when it comes to postponing the game. 16 ready-to-play players are enough for the kick-off. The German Football League (DFL) responded to the criticism and has the current regulations for possible game cancellations checked again from the 2022/23 season.
The “Football Commission” was charged with doing this. The review of the regulation, which was last amended on May 14, 2020, has already begun. I am going to change the rules during the current round “With an eye to the integrity of the competition at the present time aside”. The DFL has been advising the clubs to coordinate closely with the local health department for weeks. The local authorities set different priorities.
Effects on the transfer market
Nobody knows how many players are still out. That is why the clubs are currently not trying to get rid of some permanent reservists, as is usually the case during the winter break. “We will take the current Corona situation into account and will not sell anyone for heck-out-a-hell. Especially since we will be playing every three days again from March onwards.”, said sports director Markus Krösche from the EuropeanLeague– Participant Eintracht Frankfurt.
The sporting consequences
“I don’t hope that in the end you have to talk about who came through better in January or February”said Fredi Bobic, sports director of Hertha BSC. But the probability is high – from the first to the third division.
“In the fight for promotion or against relegation that can be a factor”, says sports director Oliver Kreuzer from the second division club Karlsruher SC. Eintracht Braunschweig’s sports director Peter Vollmann expresses it more clearly: “Corona will influence results in the coming months, decide games and cause shifts in the table.”
The outlook
Should the World Health Organization (WHO) be right and half of the European population had actually been infected with the Omikron variant by March, this also applies to professional athletes – despite the comparatively high vaccination rate, which according to official information is 90 percent in professional football (70 percent of which are “boosted”). It hardly seems possible that the game can be played continuously under these conditions.
dpa
|
Status: January 12th, 2022, 12:45 pm