Fake crowd noise is good. So is shaming players who break the rules
A fanless Frauen-Bundesliga soccer match in Germany. Photo: Daniela Porcelli/SPP/Shutterstock This weekend, team sports reached a couple of noteworthy milestones. In Germany, the Bundesliga, one of the top soccer leagues in the world, completed its 2019–20 season, which had been suspended in early March, with Bayern Munich winning its eighth consecutive title.
It felt strange sometimes — there is something almost haunting about the sound a kicked soccer ball makes ricocheting around an empty stadium — but teams made it work. During the first game back, players from league runners-up Borussia Dortmund actually waved to the vacant section of the stadium usually known as the Yellow Wall, home to one of the most famous fan groups in all of sports. It was a way to acknowledge the absence of a vital aspect of the game and was actually quite moving.
3. Pump in fake crowd noise. The Bundesliga was originally hesitant to include artificial crowd sounds emanating from the stadium loudspeakers, but it changed course quickly after all the empty-building echoing of the first few games. And it sounded great! At this point, the televised sports experience has evolved so much that fans in the stands are basically just ambience anyway.
5. Don’t overreact to positive tests. Every positive test is a big deal and brings us back to the debate about whether these leagues should be playing at all. But when the NBA ran its players through its “first wave” of testing last week and 16 out of 302 tested positive , it did not go unnoticed that both commissioner Adam Silver and NBA Players Association head Michele Roberts were publicly thankful. “God forgive me, I’m somewhat relieved that the number was not higher,” Roberts said.
7. Prepare for many non-COVID injuries. If you’ve watched any soccer games during this pandemic, you’ve seen even more people rolling around on the ground than usual. The quick restart of these leagues, particularly after players spent months locked in their houses for quarantine, has led to more injuries, major and minor. The combination of poor training, compressed schedules, and the unusual nature of this whole circumstance is going to wreak havoc on these athletes’ finely tuned instruments.
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