Its been four months since the first lockdown was imposed around the world and in India , whole world came to a immediate standstill with stoppage in industrial work, Travel, Import/Export and especially sports and entertainment activities.
We have seen a major toppling in progress charts of the football industry Afterward may it be a number of tournaments or revenue around the world. In this article, we will see how sports especially football has been running and given a sight of hope /entertainment to everyone around the world and in India.
Now since everyone is trying to recover from the losses and get the economy back on its original form as soon as possible, people have started adopting the new normal and especially in sports industry by changing major competition structures and rules. Whole world is observing sports industry and how day by day it’s trying to recover around the world with its creative ideas for safety and security of stakeholders , and how football tournaments are utilizing major of the technology available to make the experience better for everyone and to maintain the revenue flow.
The First Big tournament started after Covid lockdown was ‘The K-league’ football league from South korea, they started the league in may first week behind closed doors and with appropriate safety measures, soon after that one major football event began in closed door ‘The Bundesliga’ the german football league tested all its players and staff working for the tournament twice a week and all the safety measures were followed strictly. The league ended with Bayern Munich getting its 29th Bundesliga title 30th German title.
Laliga Santander also started with same measures but they used a level up technology called virtual fans in collaboration with Norwegian firm Vizrt, to see stands in La Liga stadiums ‘virtualised’ and offer to-scale images of seated fans wearing the colours of the home team. When the game is stopped, the virtual fan images can be transformed into a canvas that will show institutional messages and other offerings.The crowd noise, meanwhile, is being supplied by EA Sports, makers of the FIFA video game franchise. At the end of league Real Madrid lifted the title for laliga 2020.
Along with this shortly Serie-A resumed the league with few rounds remaining to play and juventus leading the table. The preimer league at England had also been resumed and Liverpool has lifted the title after so many years.
If we talk about indian football, ISL has witnessed its first ever closed door finals and ATK winning the title this year, Reliance foundation young champs and JSW academy got Two star accreditation from AFC grassroots comitee, Mizoram getting its first FIFA certified ground and India getting hosting rights for 2022 ASIA Womens football cup.
A big collaboration of mohun bagan fc and ISL champions ATK has been taken place and Eastbengal fc got TGI Fridays an American food chain as a sponsor, and to top it up ISL gets its seat at world league forum.
There has been few downs to the industry ofcourse , if we see the other way around even though there were no major tournaments happening we’ve witnessed so much and the speed at which the whole footballing industry is coming back is remarkable. In india as well AIFF is striving hard to plan its upcoming leagues and provide a roadmap to the nations footballing feternity to rise up from this pandemic together and better.