Ajax on collision course with Dutch league as German clubs look to get back to normality

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - It would take little over an hour to drive from Genk to Monchengladbach via Sittard, a journey that goes from Belgium, through the Netherlands to Germany. The highways are good, the borders inconspicuous. This is concentrated football territory. All those towns have top division clubs.

But to make that trip on Monday would have been to pass through strikingly different attitudes about how to manage the coronavirus pandemic.

The Belgian Pro League, where Genk were champions in 2019, have proposed that the current season, which had one round of fixtures left before its elaborate play-off phase, be abandoned. In the Dutch Eredivisie - where Ajax and AZ Alkmaar are locked on the same points in first and second place, with nine games left, while Fortuna Sittard battle against relegation - several clubs are pushing for full cancellation.

Yet a few miles away, in Monchengladbach, Borussia were among a majority of Bundesliga clubs where players returned to training, albeit under special conditions.

The Covid-19 virus does not respect borders, but, as Uefa, the most powerful continental governing body in football, are discovering, there are big frontiers in opinion over how to plan for when football, under closedown since March in most countries, is allowed to return to stadiums.

Uefa have prioritised the completion of domestic leagues when and if it is safe. They have acknowledged that, to create a possible timetable where it might be plausible to finish domestic fixture-lists, they needed to postpone all international dates from June until September and be ready to postpone the rest of the 2019/20 Champions League and Europa League until as late as August. At stake is the financial stability of thousands of clubs, with television-rights income dependent on the season being concluded on the terms broadcasters signed up to.

In Germany, where the virus has not reached the same devastating levels of infection as in parts of southern Europe, public health authorities allowed most professional clubs to tentatively return to work, with a resumption of Bundesliga games, probably behind closed doors, targeted for some time in May.

In North Rhine Westphalia, the jurisdiction of Monchengladbach, a Ministry of Health permit was issued allowing professional athletes to train as long they remained on the premises of their employers.

“Football is not claiming special status,” Borussia’s sporting director Max Eberl said, “and our top priority remains everybody’s health. But this gives us the chance to do some training, which is a small step, respecting the specific requirements.”

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Among those requirements: No training drills that bring players into situations where they are duelling, face to face; that practice takes place in small groups; that the players and staff are not enclosed together in dressing-rooms or canteens.

While this ‘safe-distance’ practice was being enacted by the elite players of the Bundesliga at training sites across Germany, executives from Dutch clubs were consulting about their strategy. Ajax’s director of football Marc Overmars made public his view.

“The Eredivisie is dead,” he told De Telegraaf, and his case for abandoning the current campaign, to safeguard health and also ensure as far as possible that the 2020/21 season can start without a backlog of 2019/20 fixtures, seems to be supported by PSV Eindhoven, another of the three so-called ‘heavyweight’ Dutch clubs, though not yet by Feyenoord, who are third in the table.

Twelve months ago, Ajax were preparing to take on - and beat - Juventus in the Champions League quarter-finals, part of a magical European Cup adventure for the club. That all seems a long way in the past, though, as Overmars points out, Ajax are still the Dutch club who have most to lose in terms of matchday income if the domestic season is halted.

Yet they could lose even more if - because of an extension to the European league calendar into July and August - the summer transfer window does not open as usual. Ajax have significant sales of players planned - a deal worth an initial €40 million (Dh159m) for the winger Hakim Ziyech with Chelsea has already been agreed.

Dutch clubs will hold talks Tuesday about their next move. Uefa have already warned that unilaterally cancelling the current season could affect a league’s allocation of places in the next Champions League and Europa League.

The Belgian Pro League learnt that when they announced their season was over. They are being encouraged to step back from that and reconsider.