BERLIN — At 3:30 on Saturday afternoon, in an empty stadium in Dortmund that normally holds more than 80,000 people, professional football came back. The Bundesliga’s return makes Germany the first of Europe’s major leagues to resume after the coronavirus shutdown, and the world is watching to see whether it can work.
The matches are being played behind closed doors, in what Germans call Geisterspiele — ghost games. Players arrive in several buses, are tested regularly, and celebrate goals at a distance. Borussia Dortmund’s 4-0 win over Schalke in the Ruhr derby, normally one of the loudest fixtures in European football, was played out against a backdrop of silence and tarpaulins covering the famous Yellow Wall.
The restart follows weeks of negotiation between the league, the clubs and regional governments, and it comes with a detailed hygiene protocol that other competitions are already studying. England’s Premier League, Spain’s La Liga and Italy’s Serie A all hope to follow in June.
Not everyone is convinced. Polls have shown many Germans uneasy about football returning while restrictions govern daily life, and several clubs have had to isolate players after positive tests. League officials argue the alternative — abandoning the season — would bankrupt clubs across the country.
Whatever the reservations, the experiment matters beyond Germany. If nine rounds of matches can be completed safely in empty stadiums, the Bundesliga will have written the manual for how elite sport lives with the virus. If not, the ghost games may be remembered as a cautionary tale.
Media-Society.com is a press network association based in Spain, founded in 2020. More at www.media-society.com.
