With Restart Date Now Set, What Lessons Can Premier League Learn From The Bundesliga?

June 17. After a 14-week hiatus that’s when the Premier League
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will resume the 2019/20 season as the soccer world begins to get the ball rolling again amid the global coronavirus pandemic. Many believed the campaign would have to be decided on a points per-game basis or perhaps even null and voided such were the challenges posed by this unprecedented crisis, but others have led the way and now England’s top league, the most popular soccer league in the world, is following.

The Bundesliga was the first major division to resume play, with fixtures starting again on May 16. Their relative success in playing behind closed doors and in a highly restricted environment has seemingly emboldened other leagues who now hope to use similar methods. Indeed, La Liga, Serie A and, of course, the Premier League have all made announcements this week setting out a time table for a return to action.

So what lessons can the Premier League, and other divisions, learn from what the Bundesliga has done? In terms of testing, the way players have been regularly tested for coronavirus ever since their return to training has set a bar in terms of how stringent league bodies and national associations must be in continuing to monitor the disease.

Perhaps most valuable about the precedent the Bundesliga has set, though, has been their reaction to positive tests when they have emerged. Players, like Werder Bremen’s Claudio Pizarro, have been made to isolate even after the positive test of a family member, while Bundesliga 2’s Dynamo Dresden were quarantined due to multiple infections. But this is how the system is designed to work.

“I don’t see it as a setback, because we expected that something like this could happen,” DFL chief executive Christian Seifert explained at the time, underlining how this likelihood had been factored into the schedule set out to complete the season. “We still have a buffer to stage more matches in the next couple of weeks.”

Test and trace is meant to do exactly that, test and trace, and soccer presents a natural environment for this to work as intended, with players and coaching staff kept in something of a bubble. The Bundesliga has actually played a role in communicating to the wider public how an effective test and trace network should operate, with many countries around Europe now in this phase of suppressing the virus.

From the social distancing of substitutes in the stands rather than sitting on the bench as usual, to the awkward elbow tap celebrations, to the long distance interviewing of managers after the match, Bundesliga players and figures have shown a willingness to adapt to the new normal, easing concerns over how disciplined players would be once they were on the pitch.

There have been some violations, with Hertha Berlin’s players notably flouting the guidelines by high-fiving and hugging each other during their opening game of the resumption, but by and large there has been a league-wide acceptance and adherence that has surely provided encouragement to the Premier League and others.

Some other experiments have had more mixed results, but these have mainly been related to the broadcast and showcase of matches as spectacles rather than anything health-related. Some broadcasters have added artificial crowd noise to their coverage in an attempt to mask the eery silence that comes with playing in an empty stadium. Many fans like it, others don’t.

Borussia Monchengladbach filled their stadium with more than 12,000 cardboard cutouts of fans who had paid for a virtual ticket to a game in what was another illustration of the surreal world soccer is now being played in. Meanwhile, some groups of fans have hung banners protesting the decision to play at all, with many highlighting the alleged greed of Bundesliga decision makers to put money over safety.

Sky Germany have charted record-breaking TV ratings and attracted new viewers to the league over the first few match days after the restart, which bodes well for Amazon
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, BBC, BT Sport and Sky Sports who have all been awarded broadcast rights by the Premier League to show every one of the remaining 92 fixtures of the season. It’s possible one of those viewers was someone from the Premier League, taking notes on how the Bundesliga has managed to pull it off.