News from nowhere: Pitch invasion or pitch-perfect?

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Last Tuesday, England won the football game. The city streets rang with cheers. It was the team’s first match in the knockout stage of the European Championship, and it was the first time that England had defeated Germany in an international tournament since the World Cup final in 1966. The special significance of winning an encounter with Germany was of course related to the most unfortunate business which had occurred some two decades before even that historic match.

Forty thousand fans had been allowed into London’s Wembley Stadium to watch the game. That morning, one newspaper had described the prospect of victory as the ‘shot in the arm’ the country needed. The following morning’s papers announced that this was ‘finally something to cheer about’ – that it was like ‘emerging into a strange new light’ – that finally, it was about time for a broken nation to dream again.

Such events are not merely of symbolic value. As well as boosting the nation’s morale, the hefty increases in spending on food and (mainly) drinks around such occasions provide much-needed revenues for the economy and, in particular, for the highly precarious hospitality sector. These economic opportunities may, however, prompt other, less welcome impacts. 

The day before England’s football triumph, one of the BBC’s best-known political journalists revealed how, despite having been fully vaccinated, he had become quite unpleasantly ill after contracting Covid at the G7 summit in June. This news served as a timely reminder of the infection risks posed by such large assemblies.

A recent series of pilot events run in the UK has suggested that, when properly managed, the incidence of Covid-19 transmission at mass gatherings may be relatively low, with just 28 cases reported from nine events (including Wembley’s FA Cup final), which in total involved 58,000 participants. However, scientists have warned that this data relied mostly on lateral flow testing; there was relatively limited uptake of the more accurate PCR test among those who participated. We may note that unlike the G7 or the Euros, these were domestic events; they didn’t involve the influx of large numbers of international participants. Moreover, the impact of the continuing spread of the highly transmissible delta variant on future infections rates remains unclear. It wouldn’t, therefore, seem unfair to suggest that the findings of these trials may be thought to err on the side of the optimistic.

The semi-finals and final of the Euro tournament are scheduled to take place at Wembley this month, with an allowed capacity of 60,000. The British government has already been the target of criticism for allowing 2,500 European football officials and their VIP guests to attend these matches without being subject to the country’s increasingly stringent quarantine regime. However, the government is at the same time under substantial pressure from members of its own parliamentary party (not to mention their business backers) to remove pandemic restrictions and return the economy to a normal footing as soon as possible.

We must recall that, despite the success of Britain’s vaccination campaign, this same government has been repeatedly accused of immense failings in its response to this global health crisis. The most often cited issues have included delays in the imposition of lockdowns, border closures, and quarantine protocols, the failure to protect care homes and provide proper protective equipment to frontline healthcare workers, the rule-breaking conduct of key members of the administration, and the late introduction and lack of efficacy of test, track and trace systems. More recently, the devastating spread of the delta variant across the UK has been blamed upon the government’s decision (apparently motivated by diplomatic concerns in the run-up to scheduled trade talks) to defer the implementation of strict border controls relating to travel from India.

Sport is important; it enriches many people’s lives. But it’s also important because its financial impacts bring about real international power to its organizations. A British government that has repeatedly failed in its responses to the pandemic and which faces huge political pressure from within its own ranks to reopen the economy – even if that means seeing the bodies pile high once more – has been pushed to risk the roll-out of partially tested scenarios for the sake of its center-stage involvement in the beautiful game. The Japanese government has, of course, been confronted with similar dilemmas in relation to its hosting of the Olympics this month in the face of overwhelming public opposition. There will be lessons to be learned from this summer’s international sports festivals that may echo well beyond next year’s World Cup in Qatar.

Last month, the England vs. Scotland Euro match – the first fixture of its kind at an international football tournament in a generation – had resulted in thousands of Scottish supporters ending up without tickets, so they defied their own government’s pleas and travelled south to watch the game in impromptu and unauthorised mass gatherings in central London. In such contexts, the negotiation of cultural, social, political, economic, and health priorities represents a complex and controversial balancing act. There seems almost no way to pitch it just right.

On Saturday, England again won the football game. The quarter-final match against Ukraine went rather better than many of their fans had dared to hope, and England will now play Denmark in the semi-finals of the Euro this week. It would, nevertheless, be churlish to suggest that this result might in the longer term have less gratifying consequences for a briefly triumphant nation.

The legendary football manager Bill Shankly once observed that his sport wasn’t, as some thought, a matter of life and death. He said it was much more serious than that. As the crowds at Wembley rise to fever pitch, the Euros seem set to prove him right.

The UK government currently expects Covid restrictions to be lifted on 19 June. Infections have been growing exponentially over the past few weeks but, thanks to high rates of vaccination, levels of hospitalization and fatality have not risen so swiftly. Yet Britain – like the rest of the world – remains on a knife-edge, and it appears clear that things will never be quite the same again.