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Simon Jordan ridiculous comments when talking about Premier League football return

4 years ago
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Simon Jordan, as ever, desperate for attention.

The failed football club owner talking about the potential return of Premier League football.

With relation to the virus situation and the Premier League / football, Simon Jordan says: ‘You cannot have a situation where a global sport of this magnitude has a player who becomes infected, which is an absolute inevitability because they are going to get infected until we find a vaccine.’

Jordan going on to say: ‘And what happens then, corporate manslaughter?’

Simon Jordan thinks the ‘best case scenario’ being that the rest of this Premier League season is cancelled.

This could indeed be the case and football will only be allowed to be played again when the medical experts and the government give the go ahead, no matter what the Premier League would want to do. Not that they argue against medical or governmental advice, always keen to make clear in any statement / update that this is the case.

Simon Jordan says you can’t have a situation where a Premier League player becomes infected. Well I hate to break it to him but a number of them already have had the virus, with no doubt many more of them also having had it but not even realising, or at least not making the fact public.

The lockdown measures are all about trying to help control the spread of the virus and in particular, trying to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed at any point.

However, there are some massive flaws in Jordan’s arguments.

There will never be a time when it is 100% safe for anybody, it is all about minimising risks as far as is humanly possible. Will a factory worker’s family be able to sue for ‘corporate manslaughter’ if he / she has to go back to work in order to keep their job and provide for their family, then gets the virus and sadly passes away?

Simon Jordan talks of waiting for a vaccine to be available but there is a possibility there never will be an effective vaccine…but that doesn’t mean none us can ever go back to work. Everybody at some point will have to go back to work (if their jobs are still there…) because otherwise the whole system breaks down. It is also a fact that no vaccine, if it can be developed, would ever be 100% for everybody it was given to, just as is the case with those of us who have a flu jab each year. It just minimises the chances of you getting it.

Jordan’s comments just totally ignore the fact as well that for many many millions of people, nothing has even changed these past seven weeks or so anyway, in terms of having to go to work. Not just doctors and nurses, as well as other emergency service workers. The likes of NHS cleaners and admin staff, people working in food shops / supermarkets, the whole food supply chain and so on, with no doubt a massive proportion of them on minimum wage.

Simon Jordan states: ‘we have got a disease we don’t have a vaccine for, while this isn’t a problem in everyone’s workplace, everyone isn’t spitting and kicking each other as footballers do.’

Does he honestly think that football players, especially with very regular testing if they do start playing again, are more at risk if they had to play football for less than a couple of hours a week in the open air against a small controlled group of other people, than say shop workers coming into relatively close contact with thousands and thousand of random customers every week?

If the argument about the return of football is purely about the health risks for players then I don’t think it holds up. Once the vast majority of workers in pretty much every other line of work are back working, albeit with as many health measures taken as possible to minimise risk, how can professional football players be any different?

Plus, the reality is, that with no players on the pitch, the money in the not so distant future won’t be there to pay them.

Premier League football shouldn’t be rushed back recklessly but certainly when you are talking about games behind closed doors, the same as for the rest of us who have had our work life interrupted, it won’t be too long until they have to go back to work – with as many safety measures in place as possible.

Simon Jordan speaking to Talksport:

“I think we are in a situation where the best case scenario in my view is that we lose the season.

“Liverpool aren’t champions, Leeds aren’t promoted, Aston Villa aren’t relegated, Norwich aren’t relegated. We are really into that territory now.

“As much as I don’t want to be a doomsday merchant, we have got a disease we don’t have a vaccine for, while this isn’t a problem in everyone’s workplace, everyone isn’t spitting and kicking each other as footballers do.

“You cannot have a situation where a global sport of this magnitude has a player who becomes infected, which is an absolute inevitability because they are going to get infected until we find a vaccine.

“And what happens then, corporate manslaughter?

“Everything falls secondary to public health, players’ health and the health of people who work around the stadium and the health of players’ families because of the policing and management of how players are going to interact with COVID-19 in our eco-system.

“This is going to be there for another 12 months, until we work out what it does, how it does it and how we can find out some kind of methodology of how we can live with it. The challenge is what is going to change?

“Is COVID-19 going to go away in the next six weeks? Unlikely.

“If out of the clear blue sky, we have a contagion rate that drops, and we have a viral load in people which has been identified by scientists as being so slow that the RNS rate is 0.1 then possibly, but I think we are really challenged.

“Don’t make any decisions now. But the idea that suddenly we are going to switch the lights on in June to me is inconceivable.”

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