Party favors, disinfection of balls and celebrations with the elbows: 5 radical changes in football with the new health protocol to combat the coronavirus

Of Germany to the world. The Bundesliga has reactivated its 2019/20 season and it has become the elite first soccer league who again rolls his ball in the midst of a pandemic of coronavirus. The ball did not stop in countries like Turkmenistan, Belarus or Nicaragua, but the return of the German championship means the return of a world-wide sports competition and is also the beginning of a new era. Five games of the nine corresponding to the Date 26 and that has allowed us to see the development of various health protocols to avoid the spread of COVID-19, measures that could be replicated over a long period, perhaps for months or even more than a year, and in several high-level tournaments.

After several weeks of conditioned workouts and the realization of thousands of tests between soccer players, technicians, physical therapists and staff of the teams, the German league has decreed their return almost a month in advance of the dates they handle in mid-June for their resumption both the League of Spain, as the A series and the Premier League. Even without the creation of a vaccine, the Bundesliga It has managed to adapt to current times and implemented some modifications that could end up becoming normal. Germany leads the way between the inevitable uncertainty with these profound changes:

• DISINFECTION OF BALLS AND PREVENTIVE DISTANCE

After several weeks of training under strict sanitary norms and with restrictions to avoid contagions, such as staying concentrated in hotels or sports centers, or comply with very detailed rules of confinement in their homes – for example, a DT could not direct because they went out to shop -, the teams of the Bundesliga made their return to competition.

The return was under some rules, such as mandatory use of masks in all its members, which were divided into several buses to respect social distancing. In addition, the interviews in the pre-match were done remotely and the balls were disinfected before, during and after the match dispute.

• TRIBUNES EMPTY OR WITH STRAPS OF COTILLÓN

Everyone knows that one of the great attractions is the atmospheres and the heat of the public. But in times of coronavirus, football will be behind closed doors. And the contrast was very striking in the Bundesliga, a contest that has a average of more than 40,000 people per party in the last 15 years.

This day particularly featured the dispute of the Ruhr Classic between Borussia Dortmund and FC Schalke 04 in the Signal Iduna Park, a stadium that had a average attendance of 81,154 people this season. The usual thing in a match of this magnitude was to listen to the fans constantly encourage, but this time the only sounds were the ball hits and the screaming among the players, which was repeated in every stadium where there was action this Saturday.

But there were also teams, like the Borussia Mönchengladbach, who has managed to simulate the assists of his fans with 12,000 cardboard cutouts they filled the Borussia-Park for his next duel that will be before him Bayer Leverkusen May 23.

• THE GAME BROKEN THE DISTANCE

One of the weirdest questions on the return of soccer from Germany to the competition has been that the players have respected the distances as much as possible in the changing room tunnel, before the start of the matches – there were no protocol greetings or pets and the teams went out in different batches to the pitch– and even in the celebrations of goals, where a clash of fists and elbows were mostly seen, but the essence of the game and its dynamics have inevitably forced them to collide with rivals.

• MASKS FOR EVERYONE

“I'm going to have to take off my mask just before I start screaming and put it on again right after I stop screaming. It will not be easy. I will have to practice it a little ”I had joked Julian Nagelsmann, DT of RB Leipzig, before Date 26. All Bundesliga coaches had to wear face masks until the time of coaching, only there could they remove it.

However, one of the most recurrent images on this twenty-sixth day has been that all the people who were involved in the development of the parties, including theirplentes, ball boys and helpers, were with the covered mouth and nose.

• FOOTBALL OF THE FIVE CHANGES

A few days before the competition resumed, the Deutsche Fussball Liga (DFL) officially confirmed that the Bundesliga and the 2. Bundesliga They went to make use of the possibility of the five changes that FIFA has opened to take care of the footballers' physique. German clubs did not hesitate to apply this variant and, for example, in the 'Ruhr Classic' nine players entered: four of the Dortmund, five from Schalke.

In the rest of the matches, the FC Augsburg, Hoffenheim, SC Freiburg and Fortuna Düsseldorf made four changes, while SC Parderborn and Hertha Berlin all five also took advantage. Every time a player left the field, he had to put on a mask and go to the substitute bank. Of course, all the substitutions could only be made in three opportunities, something that guarantees that the maximum number of game interruptions be the same as always.

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