VSIt’s a strong condemnation: whether it’s the current season, if we can finish it, or the one to come, we know that to resume professional competitions will have to take place behind closed doors. At least until September, or "Until further notice, until we find a vaccine", warned the Minister of Sports, Roxana Maracineanu.
The closed door is no longer a provisional expedient, as it was envisaged before confinement, it is no longer even only a means of dispatching the last parts of the season in order to avoid disputes concerning qualifications to come: this is a lasting doctrine.
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Slump
Sports events are therefore doomed to lose their spectators, and spectators to become viewers. A conversion already accomplished by all those who no longer had the means to afford seats, and by banned supporters. This time, it's the stadium administrative ban for everyone.
High-level sport is thus condemned to a long slump, and the damage will not only be economic. Because for supporters, including the ultras, for those who go to the stadium to live a passion, behind closed doors is hell. Some having already experienced such sanctions taken against their stadium, they know what it is: a punishment.
Beyond the deprivation suffered, the closed door offers the opposite of what they want to do with a football match. This moment of collective emotions, experienced in noise and fervor, becomes a sinister silent performance.
Everything hurts the senses. Hangar acoustics echo the cries, and this trivial soundtrack completely desecrates the event. A harsh light bathes him in an atmosphere of surgical operation. The match has lost its flesh, its substance, and it is understandable that the ultras are protesting against this sport put under bell by "greed".
Virtual spectators
The controversies surrounding the World Championships in Athletics, disputed in Qatar before a meager audience, recalled that the spectators do more than the number, they compete. The crowd is more than a decoration or an atmospheric agent: it magnifies the competition, it gives it its symbolic significance, it defines its prestige.
Proof of this is that the Professional Football League (LFP) has gone so far as to adopt a regulation promising sanctions to clubs that do not ensure that priority is given to the stands in front of the cameras, in order to give the illusion of stadiums. full…
The void is so damaging that one makes an effort of imagination. In preparation for the takeover of the Bundesliga, a group of supporters from Mönchengladbach had fans made of cardboard effigies and placed in the stands. Also in Germany, an application is envisaged to trigger at a distance the encouragements – clamor, chants, applause – broadcast by loudspeakers.
We may have come close to some virtual reality fantasies that imagine dematerialized stages. Meanwhile, the lack of authentic human beings is glaring. What remains of the sports spectacle in the absence of spectators? Without a doubt, a degraded product for viewers and devalued for broadcasters.
Public revenge
Televisions will want to believe that a match remains a match, that Neymar's catches are no less beautiful if they do not raise clamor, that a title in the Champions League cannot lose prestige. They can still sell this show, promote the sporting issue.
But the laboratory that was, on March 11, the strange PSG-Borussia Dortmund, did not go in this direction. The curiosity aroused by this meeting did not compensate for the impression of attending a slightly morbid ersatz, unworthy of a meeting at this stage in the Champions League.
The paradox is there, especially in elite football: spectators seemed to become more and more incidental in the economic model of clubs – like the relationship between ticketing revenues and revenues from broadcasting rights .
With the gentrification of the public, the moods have watered down all over Europe. Avant-garde stadiums, such as Juventus, are more undersized than the other way around. In some countries, such as France, supporters are treated as undesirable …
Perhaps the spectators hold a form of revenge, as painful as it is for themselves, in the reminder that they are not only consumers and that, without them, high performance sport is no longer a live performance.
