Most people believed that sports would be back in May, but as we are approaching the season, having live sports are nowhere in sight. Now most of us are tired of watching games that are ten years old and we already know the outcome. The truth about getting live sports this month is that it is very unlikely to happen, and if it does it would take so many precautions that there wouldn’t be a point.Until we have a vaccine it is unlikely for anything to return back to “normal” unless we can come up with a way to safely contain the virus. Again people believe we could have live sports without the fans in the stands, but doesn’t that take away from the experience of watching it with the fans bringing the energy to the stadiums.
The reason for not having live sports with filled stadiums is because people would be in close quarters. With 50,000 people for a long period of time, basically breaking every rule of social distancing there is. Now for some people, the question is, “Why don’t we bring back games without fans?” Having games with fans is exactly what the health experts want us to avoid, a large group of people in a confined space. Those places are where the virus thrives and spreads very quickly. “Why not have the games with no fans?” The problem with having these games is the number of people that it takes to actually put on the games. “Bundesliga, Germany’s top soccer league, estimated that around 240 people ” (NYTimes) there would still be a high risk of the coronavirus spreading even if we did take precautions, and then we are back where we started in March, instead of getting better.
Living in the south, football is the biggest thing that happens around here, and football sundays are a day of gathering with friends and family as well. With the upcoming season we are hoping that the season will happen. The NFL isn’t doing much as of right now, but they did take precaution for the NFL draft. All of the head coaches, players, general managers, owners, and the NFL commissioner stayed in their homes and set up a camera. While the season has not been cancelled, it certainly isn’t out of the questions. Just imagine playing an NFL game without the fans, it would seem like a paradox. The players feed off of the fans, and they wouldn’t have that. The game would be different, it would feel different.
The fastest way for us to get sports back is to stay inside and social distance ourselves until we have some form of vaccine or a very low number of cases in the U.S. So instead of protesting about not having sports, we should do all we can to stay inside so we can get sports back as soon as possible and get the magic of sports back.