Gary Neville is unhappy that Arsenal and other teams are getting prepared for a return to Premier League action while the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the globe.
Football around the world has been suspended because of the pandemic which affected Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta before they stopped games.
The Premier League and other football federations across Europe are getting set for the resumption of league games again at the end of next month, but they do not impress Neville with that development.
The former Manchester United full-back thinks that the only reason the Premier League wants to resume is purely economics, and he wonders if footballers have to die before the governing bodies would consider it unsafe to play football.
He claims that the prizes at stake for teams like Leeds United who have worked so hard to get a promotion are clouding the judgement of those in charge of the game and they will risk playing.
He said as quoted by the Sun: “The Fifa medical officer said that football should not take place before September. I think if it was a non-economic decision there would be no football for months.
“People are now assessing risk. How many people have to die playing football in the Premier League before it becomes unpalatable? One? One player? One member of staff goes into intensive care? What risk do we have to take? The discussion is purely economic.
“There will be people who will view it as a risk factor. Players themselves will want to go and play. Players at the lower levels will want to go play and 1,400 players are out of contract.
“Clubs have huge investment in this season. Think about what’s at stake for Leeds, it’s absolutely massive. There are big prizes up for grabs. There’s huge economic loss. It clouds people’s minds in terms of the risk that they’re willing to take.”
The same applies to Gary Neville, he is a renowned socialist that tried the get England players to go out on strike when Rio Ferdinand, his club teammate, failed to take a drug test. He also has a visceral dislike of Liverpool and Leeds United, two teams that would be severely hit by any cancellation.
Finally, he is not an economist and probably knows very little about poverty deaths. You wipe out work for hundreds of thousands of people and poverty will follow, it is not so black and white as he makes out and the Government has to take all this into consideration.
