The Players Are Doing It for Themselves, Not Us

It should not need to be said that soccer loses something without fans. Of course it does: Their absence strips it of a sense of occasion, spectacle, urgency. The noise of a crowd functions, essentially, as a Greek chorus, an emotional barometer, a form of voiceless narration of events as they unfold. It tells us — fans, distant, and players, present — how, what and when to feel.

These last three months, of games played out in stadiums, still and quiet, are not anyone’s idea of how sports should be. Though a strange alternative narrative has taken hold — in which elite soccer has chosen to do away with fans, rather than elite soccer doing the only thing it could to survive in something resembling its current form — there is nobody, anywhere, who wants to rely on computer-generated atmosphere longer than necessary.

But that is not to say that the worst fears that preceded soccer’s restart in the age of coronavirus have been realized. The worry, before those first Bundesliga games were played in May, was that — deprived of fans — the sport itself would suffer and the “show,” as Arsène Wenger called it, might not survive.

Games played in empty stadiums, without all of that noise and color and frenzy, would seem bland, lifeless, artificial. Soccer, as has been written before, does not have any inherent meaning; it is fans who imbue it with significance. Those fans in the stadium represent all of us; in their absence, the bond is broken. Not just between us and the team, but between action and importance. They are our ambassadors and interpreters, telling us what it all means.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/sports/soccer/champions-league-rory-smith.html