By Rory Smith and Tariq Panja
April 9, 2020
For three weeks, the world’s richest soccer league has been consumed by a debate over whether players, or clubs, should bear the cost of the coronavirus crisis. It has turned so toxic the schism may be hard to heal.
LONDON — By Saturday afternoon, after three weeks of impasse, after hearing their morals questioned by politicians and witnessing their clubs start to line up for government bailouts, the players of the Premier League decided to take matters into their own hands.
The captains of the league’s 20 clubs, as well as many of its managers and several executives, dialed into a videoconference meeting with the aim of establishing a collective position on a subject that has threatened to turn the English public against English soccer at a time of national crisis.
Somehow, as the country’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has started to mount, the issue of whether the stars of the Premier League — the richest domestic soccer tournament on the planet and one of Britain’s proudest cultural exports — should take a pay cut has moved front and center.
How soccer — which was placed on indefinite hiatus in England on March 13 — has found itself cast as one of the villains of the crisis speaks volumes not only about the political reality of the game in England but also of the singular role it plays in the national psyche.
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