Yahoo News Lyon president wants French league to rescind cancelation of season, resume play
France’s top soccer league, Ligue 1, canceled its season due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, with sports slowly resuming across Europe and life starting to return to normal in the country, one club president is asking French authorities to reconsider and resume the season.
Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas wrote a letter to both the French Prime Minister and Sports Minister asking them to allow the league to resume play, due largely to the “catastrophic” financial consequences the early ending will cause. According to the report, French teams could lose between €700 and €900 million.
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Germany’s Bundesliga resumed play earlier this month without fans in the stands, and other countries have started training and practicing again ahead of their own leagues starting back up in the near future.
France, Aulas said, was the only one of the top seven leagues in Europe to cancel completely. Both the Dutch and Belgian leagues have canceled their seasons, too, however.
“The Bundesliga resumed matches on May 16, Spain will resume matches on June 8. Italy, Russia and Portugal have resumed collective training and England is working on a resumption after June 19,” Aulas wrote, via the Associated Press. “How can France not be downgraded very quickly and see its professional football devalued?”
There were more than 5.4 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus worldwide as of Monday afternoon, according to The New York Times, and nearly 350,000 deaths attributed to it. France had more than 145,000 cases and more than 28,000 deaths, among the most in Europe along with Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom.
Paris Saint-Germain was declared the Ligue 1 champion when the season was canceled. Lyon was seventh in the table with 10 rounds remaining on the schedule.
While Aulas knows they may not be able to jump back in and play the entire season, he argued that the league should be allowed to hold some sort of temporary or modified postseason system later this summer.
“Many developments and hopes are expected on this date, so that France can gradually regain a good dynamic,” Aulas wrote, via the Associated Press. “Could we imagine that June 2 is also a great opportunity to rectify the mistake concerning French football and to allow, with a health protocol used everywhere, to give the starting point for a gradual resumption of training [in June] and, why not, a resumption of the 2019-2020 season over the months of July or August?”
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