The tilted short shutdown at Easter and the apology from Chancellor Angela Merkel also removed all doubts for professional sport: After the decision for a nationwide Easter rest was revised, the Bundesliga and the German elite classes in basketball, handball, volleyball and ice hockey can also be maintain their gaming operations. The German Football League (DFL) had previously assumed that the game day on Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday could take place as planned – including the top match between RB Leipzig and FC Bayern and the Berlin city derby between Union and Hertha BSC.
Conflicting information from Lower Saxony, Saxony and Berlin had previously led to confusion about the consequences of the Easter rest. Berlin’s governing mayor Michael Müller had announced that there had to be a nationwide solution for professional sports at Easter. The Prime Minister of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer, initially did not want to guarantee that the top Bundesliga match could take place on Easter Saturday in Leipzig.
After more than a year of pandemic, ghost games under strict conditions have become normal. A whole Bundesliga year without a stadium spectator has passed without a single game in the first division having to be canceled due to corona after the restart. The prevailing opinion is that professional sports hardly or not at all pose a real risk to the nationwide infection process. The athletes are in their bladders and are constantly being tested. The DFL has now even tightened its medical concept, from April there will be almost daily quick tests for all Bundesliga players.
For the second half of April, a so-called “quarantine training camp” should also be planned for all clubs in the first and second division – around match days 29 to 31. That reported the Kicker citing a circular from the DFL to its 36 clubs. By isolating groups from April 14th to 26th, it would be possible to “additionally secure three match days”, according to the letter from DFL boss Christian Seifert and board member Ansgar Schwenken.
Even before the restart of the Bundesliga in May 2020, the teams had already gone to such a “quarantine training camp”. With this, the DFL is reacting to “potentially increasing incidences” and to the “high percentage, further increasing involvement of various, sometimes significantly more contagious virus variants”. There is also “a tendency among the health authorities to send professional football teams (after individual cases) into quarantine,” wrote the DFL. Due to the frequent occurrence of corona cases, several game cancellations were recently made in the second division.
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