Another weekend without fans- how much longer can football continue like this?

 Another weekend without fans- how much longer can football continue this? 

So where are we? It's now six months since football last heard or saw a football fan, half a year without that special communal football supporter relationship between the fans themselves and the players they've always adored and idolised. None can possibly explain that sweet chemistry, that glorious kinship between the people who have saved up for the best part of who knows how much for a season ticket and the players who score their thrilling goals for the home side and then kiss the club's badge for all its worth. 

We are now into the third week of the new Premier League season and football just tootles along like one of those classic Hornby train sets that your parents once gave you for your birthday. Here we at the end of September and the mass return of football supporters back into the stadiums where once those fans once so excitedly congregated is no nearer a possibility than it might have been three weeks ago when the new Premier League season began.

Last Thursday there were doom-laden pronouncements emanating from the British government that pubs, clubs and restaurants would have to close at 10pm which meant a mass exodus to the local off licences and yet more alcoholic indulgence on the streets of Britain. Then roughly a day later we were informed that football's proposed set of pilot matches inviting some fans back into the stadium by way of a dummy run would have to be cancelled for the foreseeable future. 

To watch the Beautiful Game seemingly imploding and then exploding before our eyes is quite the most gruesome sight. We realise that the coronavirus looks set to remain with us for some time and nobody is to blame. Or are they? But rumours are circulating to the effect that we could be here until next spring's first daffodils before football fans are allowed to do something they've derived such immeasurable enjoyment from for decades and decades. 

The truth is of course some of us are genuinely worried about the future of the game now. Our brows are furrowed, our minds are overthinking and analysing the current situation and wondering whether they'll ever be welcomed back into the ground that had almost become a spiritual second home for them. They've forked out money for their extortionate season tickets and manoeuvred themselves awkwardly at first past their fellow supporters just to be with family and friends in that much -prized seat.  Then with the onset of winter now they'll button up their parka coat, tug their hoods over their heads and then laugh at their burgers or sausages perhaps. 

This time though we are in the now fateful year of 2020 and the world is motionless, seized by inertia, going nowhere and frightened to go out at all or maybe not. But football is now into yet another season and, to be perfectly honest, looks and sounds as if it belongs on a building site. The only difference we have now discovered is that there are no cement mixers, no men carrying hods with hard hats and very little in the way of bricks and mortar. 

At this point it is almost impossible to tell whether Liverpool will once again re-assert their Premier League superiority since it does seem as if the whole season will be dictated by an alien environment they may be forced to play in and whatever passes for self-motivation. Clearly, the players will have to ask themselves whether it's worth just jumping in the air with a private fist pump of goal-scoring celebration and then trudging slowly back to the centre circle with what seems nothing like an emotional reaction.

We are now in the world of madness, childishness and, above all silliness. Football used to be proud of that surge and sway of those heaving terraces, that very vocal solidarity, that feverish loyalty to the team, the atrocious vulgarity and those drifting four-word expletives. Of course it was rough and ready language and of course doting parents had to close the ears of their offspring but how football cherished its football supporters. 

After all, football supporters were the bread and butter of football, the ones who helped towards paying their weekly heroes wages, paid for the teas and pasties at half time, the customary Bovril at half time and those greasy burgers dripping with cholesterol. Football supporters would regularly squeeze their way onto packed terraces and shortly before the Second World War and for several years afterwards, would pass their children over the heads of the rest of the crowd because there was little room to breathe let alone watch the game. 

At one point Charlton Athletic's old Valley ground could comfortably accommodate over 75,000 supporters and Arsenal's old Highbury ground would never have a problem with 65- 70,000 fans huddling together for warmth on cold and grey winter afternoons. With the advent of health and safety though the maximum attendances had to be drastically reduced although, having ushered in brand new, state of the art stadiums such as West Ham's new London Stadium, Arsenal's Emirates Stadium and Manchester City's freshly painted Etihad Stadium, the sense is that football may have turned full circle. 

The trouble now is of course that the unmistakable theatricality of the game has been snatched away for reasons sadly out of its control. the deafening noise now no more than some early 2019 piece of history. You rightly acknowledge that football does bear enormous responsibility for its actions and nothing will even be remotely the same for quite a while. And that must hurt for all football fans regardless of whomsover your team is. 

The painful reality has to be that most of the teams currently residing in part of the Championship, Leagues One and Two and then the non League pyramids may have to rely or even become wholly dependent on hand-outs, loans or emergency payments to just stay alive. We are now talking about possible and inevitable bankruptcy, liquidation and heartbreaking insolvency for the clubs that were once the lifeblood and oxygen supply for the teams higher up the League. We are now officially in nightmarish territory for some clubs, the end of the road for some and time to wind up the club forevermore. 

You think of some of those famous lower League giants such as Rochdale, Torquay, Grimsby Town, now very humble Portsmouth, Walsall and Darlington, teams who are in horrible danger of just disappearing in a puff of smoke without really knowing what it would have been like to one day to find themselves with altitude sickness in the Premier League. Of course this would be wishful thinking at any point in the game's evolution. But now the aforesaid football clubs are simply clinging on desperately onto the game's metaphorical cliff edge, hanging on for dear life. 

And what about the non League structure? The non League system has always been recognised as football's grassroots, the place where once full-time gardeners, carpenters, engineers and then meatpackers on factory conveyor belts would ply their trade. How much longer though, can any of  those immensely popular non League teams whose fans would normally stand on orange crates or rickety boxlike terraces, continue to survive without any semblance of revenue?

In essence football is now faced with the kind of scenario it must have been dreading, indefinitely  resembling a lifeless dummy. Eventually, every level of football will have to be rendered null and void, kaput and that'll be that. Because football without vast sums of cash or money is rather like the human race without food and drink. At the moment football is just limping along like a wounded soldier during the War. Players are obediently walking out into stadiums that if you didn't know were grounds would  surely be mistaken for ancient caves. We can only hope for some far off golden paradise where everything as it once was is now the way it will be one day. If only that day could be today or tomorrow. 

For the Premier League though concessions have been made and life goes on for the top clubs and those who make up the cultured elite, the snobs who look disdainfully on the rest of football's lower sculleries and parlours. This weekend represents business as usual for the likes of Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Spurs and Arsenal for they are the show ponies of football's class-ridden hierarchy. They'll swan around their country estates, occasionally acknowledging the servants and the cooks downstairs before retiring to their studies. The leisured aristocracy have got to keep living in the only way they know how. 

Then they'll open up their well-ironed copy of the Financial Times, light up their 10th Havana cigar, check their shares in oil and steel, down their fifth cognac of the day and then pick up a snooker cue without bothering to play the game. They'll wallow in their ivory towers, head down to their South of France harbours to check on the condition on their immaculately maintained yachts, venture over to some exotic looking golf course before ending the day on some wisteria festooned veranda where the flowers always look pretty.

This is the way it is at the moment and no matter how hard we try to convince the movers and shakers who make up the top brass of the FA, football will just bury its head in the sand. The Premier League season will roll on perhaps forever in a complete state of wilful ignorance, daunted by nothing in particular and content to lead a sport completely lacking in anything, reputation broken, a charred ruin, burning, smoking and ebbing into oblivion, in tatters. Football has lost its soul, a game whose dignity has been battered by something it simply can't fix. Some day football's bigwigs may well come to their senses. It seems unlikely but there can be no harm in hoping.   

Still maybe one day football will take its heads out of its sand and indeed smell the coffee. We miss the sheer intensity of the game as it used to be and now lament because for the moment the actors are missing, the stage is empty and there's nobody in the wings. But one day it'll all come good for football. Mark my words. If we're patient and we're prepared to wait then football will come back stronger than ever and the fans will converge in their millions from every corner of Britain. You'd better believe it.