Throughout this week, USA TODAY Sports will examine the possibility of a fall without soccer and what that would mean in a country where sport is king.
The bleakest image to date of soccer’s uncertain future amid the coronavirus pandemic was painted by the NCAA, which posted on Twitter last week a chart illustrating the wide gap between two points: one, where the NCAA “thought that we would be “in terms of flattening the national curve of confirmed cases; and two, “where are we”, with cases increasing throughout the country since the end of June.
“Although the testing and contact tracking infrastructure has expanded considerably,” reads the accompanying text, “Variations in the approach to reopening America for business and recreation have been correlated with a considerable increase in cases in recent weeks.”
This increase, along with the politicized rejection of common sense practices for wearing masks and social distancing, has cast doubt on the ability to play soccer as scheduled at all levels of competition.
High school athletic associations in California, Virginia, Texas and New York canceled the season or brought the competition to the last weeks of September. Small university conferences, including the Ivy League and Patriot League, have announced that soccer will not be played on schedule, although there may be an attempt to do so in the spring.
At the highest level of college football, two conferences on Power Five, Big Ten and Pac-12, have eliminated non-conference games to create scheduling flexibility, mitigate travel risk, and streamline testing protocol. . Several programs, including the Ohio State National Power, have seen positive evidence outbreaks and have been forced to suspend team activities.
Slowly and reluctantly, football associations from high school to the top rung of college athletics are realizing that: from a safety perspective, football and the coronavirus are dangerously incompatible.
“I think to some degree any organized athletic event will increase the risk of spreading the infection,” said Jason McKnight, assistant clinical professor at Texas A&M School of Medicine. “With any large, organized event, whether sporting or not, we are increasing the risk of exposure.”
Except for changes in uniforms and equipment, all team sports violate three of the basic factors behind decreased coronavirus transmission: masks, distance, and density. Soccer is simply the worst offender.
It is a sport that is played indoors, even outside the action, with wide receivers and defensive backs fighting for a position near the touch line. Meanwhile, the center of the action exists on the ball: the linemen repeatedly make contact, pause the whistle, return to the line of scrimmage, wait for the next blow, and repeat.
“That is obviously a part of this game,” said Brian Labus, an assistant professor of health at UNLV. “There is no way to distance yourself socially while playing. Just being around other people, whether you board them or not, doesn’t matter, just sharing your same airspace with them is where the risk comes from. ”
The game is not only played in close proximity, but with more active players than any other sport, with 22 individuals on the field in a given move. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the greatest risk scenarios are large gatherings where it is difficult to maintain social distance and “attendees travel from outside the local area.”
Without facial covers and without existing in the kind of bubble that the NBA hopes will eliminate any chance of an outbreak, soccer players will breathe and growl at each other, expel saliva through mouth guards, and end games on the same body pile . Every interaction during a soccer match is a potential Petri dish for transmission of the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19 disease.
“It is not likely to prevent the virus from passing from one person’s lungs to another person’s lungs if they are standing next to each other, or squatting, depending on the position, a few feet or a few inches away from each other , approaching each other, and doing it repeatedly over the course of a few hours, “said Rishi Desai, an infectious disease physician and chief medical officer for Osmosis, an online platform for health education.
“That just is not going to happen.”
How much risk is involved?
Sheldon Jacobson, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois who specializes in data-based risk assessment, estimates that up to half of the players in the Bowl Branch would contract the coronavirus during a traditional regular season. Jacobson also projects that up to seven players would die as a result of COVID-19.
By choosing to remove the non-conference game from the schedule, Big Ten and Pac-12 hoped to mitigate some of the risks that travel to the current coronavirus hot spots and exposure to equipment with different testing standards could entail. However, as a broader solution to allow the football season to proceed as planned, playing games only against conference opponents is of minimal benefit.
“I think you’ve gone from high risk to high risk, maybe a little bit, minimally lower,” Desai said. “But it is still a high risk.”
Playing fewer games does not address the threat posed by the virus within locker rooms and soccer facilities. Practicing outdoors allows for more space and ventilation, but that benefit is outweighed by the number of close-contact interactions during training and movie study that define the period between games.
“All that other time adds up,” Desai said.
For high schools and colleges, the remaining days of the week would also find players mingling with students, teachers, and parents, possibly spreading the virus from the outside community to teammates and coaches.
“The problem is going to be, you can control that environment, but as soon as they’re out of that environment and they’re on a normal college campus, all bets are off,” said Jon McCullers, senior associate dean of clinical affairs for the College of Medicine of the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center.
Testing one of the many obstacles
Testing is a tool to limit coronavirus outbreaks, especially as a way to identify asymptomatic carriers and “more quickly remove the player from team activities,” said Deverick Anderson, an infectious disease doctor at Duke who directs Education for Infection Control for Major Sports. or ICS.
“The main strategy is definitely routine symptom detection and temperature controls,” added Anderson. “By doing so, the number of potentially exposed downstream players would be greatly reduced.”
However, providing daily tests for teams that can have more than 100 players can be unrealistic from a financial perspective. Even those teams capable of instituting routine testing must back up that regimen with contact tracking and quarantine programs. And players must be open to sharing symptom details within a culture that values the toughness necessary to overcome injuries.
“Boys will have to learn that being a great teammate means more now than practicing hard, working hard and being positive. It means trying to care for your teammates with the virus, “said North Carolina coach Mack Brown.
“If you look around the country, there will be positives. There will be positives everywhere. Unless something changes, there will be positives throughout the season. “
It is inevitable that the virus will infiltrate football teams at all levels: The positive cases have already flooded university programs since the teams returned to campus last month. Without a vaccine, competition against other teams in different regions can worsen the spread of the virus.
As the sport reaches a tipping point in deciding whether to play this fall, the question of how football can be sustained may already have been answered: by accepting that eliminating or even markedly limiting the spread of COVID-19 is impossible. Is soccer worth risking?
“For me, things that are frankly not essential by their own definition, like sports, shouldn’t be entertained until essential activities are carried out,” Desai said. “I’d just look around me. Are we doing all the essential activities? If the answer is no, then soccer is off the table. There’s just no way. “
Follow Paul Myerberg on Twitter @PaulMyerberg
