Preparations for EURO 2021: Lobbying, vaccination and stadium renovation… But mostly lobbying
The United Kingdom has become a country with the biggest death rate when it comes to COVID-19. An average of 935 daily deaths over the last week was the equivalent of more than 16 people in every million, according to the research made by the University of Oxford. The same university recently produced a vaccine which was approved at the beginning of the year.
The country is currently facing full lockdown. People have been ordered to stay at home unless they need to go to work, shop or exercise. The message became perfectly clear when governing people started talking about the potential suspension of football due to a significant number of COVID-19 cases among players and staff which resulted in several games being postponed.
However, the idea was abandoned as soon as the Football Association reminded Boris Johnson the government is here to serve football and not the opposite.
I made up the following statement but I bet it looked something like this:
“Dear Boris,
People need football, it brings them joy and happiness in difficult times. Also, there is a lot of money in the game, you know that. We can’t renegotiate TV rights again. We still remember the mess you did in Spring with the first lockdown, but we forgive you. Just make sure you don’t do it again.”
Yours faithfully,
Football Association.”
In the challenging times when many industries are struggling to keep moving forward, the football lobbying power proved to be exceptional. What airways, pubs, restaurants, singers, plastic surgeons and models couldn’t do, football did and got itself a special COVID-19 status.
In the last weeks, the country daily saw tens of thousands of new COVID-19 cases, but the record was broken two weeks ago when there were 68.053 new cases. To speed up the process of vaccination, ten new mass vaccination centres were opened in the country on Monday, one of them in Wembley, London.
People aged 80 and over were the first to arrive on Monday morning, followed by a few aged 70+ whose turn has come as well. And while they were getting out of the building with an upgraded immune tolerance, some 100 meters away builders were working on the Wembley stadium renovation. Just over a year ago, hard to believe, England national team played there against Montenegro in front of 90 000 fans.
The final match of the EURO 2021 will be played on July 11 at Wembley. No doubt, builders will have done their part of the job by then, but the number of fans that will attend that match, and climb the new shiny stairs that lead to the stadium, is down to doctors, nurses and volunteers in that centre right there 100 yards from the stadium.
It is difficult to imagine there will be 90 000 fans at Wembley ever again, simply because that does not sound normal in the new normal, but a large number of people will need to be at Wembley on July 11 for football people to be happy. The calculation is clear. The government has five months to make it happen July 11 goes down in history as the best final ever, considering everything the world has gone through recently. Many obstacles are ahead, as a substantial part of society doesn’t feel like having the jab. The war between jabers and anti-jabers is yet to start, but that is another story, though.
So far there have been around 4 000 000 people vaccinated in the United Kingdom, which is a sharp jump if we understand around 2 000 000 were vaccinated just in the last week while another 2 000 000 were vaccinated in the whole of the first month since the mass vaccination programme had begun. To this day, there have been three different vaccines approved, so the process is speeding up. Apart from the Oxford University vaccine there are the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in use as well. Some of the new mass vaccination centres, according to Boris Johnson, will be open 24/7, meaning he is aware of THE date.
“Dear Boris,
July 11… Don’t let us down.
Yours faithfully,
Aleksander Čeferin.”
