Clubs Sell Community. Now Is the Time to Pay It Back.

Rory Smith On Soccer Soccer embraces the idea that its teams are not just businesses, but social institutions, part of their cities. Right now, that can’t just be marketing rhetoric. Sign up for Rory Smith’s weekly newsletter on world soccer (and, for the foreseeable future, quite a few other topics) at nytimes. com/rory.

Watford General Hospital is a couple of minutes’ walk, no more, from Vicarage Road, the neat, slightly frayed home of the town’s representative in the Premier League. Head out of the Graham Taylor Stand, across the parking lot, past a row of terraced houses, and you are on hospital grounds. Vicarage Road, like almost every stadium in the world — except, strangely, the ones in Belarus — is shuttered and idle, its quietness rendering it nothing more than one of countless monuments to the general shutdown of everyday life in the coronavirus age. The hospital, by contrast, like almost every hospital in the world, is essentially on war footing.

There already had been four deaths attributed to coronavirus there as of Thursday, as Britain braced for the spike and the surge. It made perfect sense, then, that the city’s soccer club should offer use of its stadium to the city’s hospital at a time when what it needs — what all medical facilities facing the crisis need — is empty space. Vicarage Road could provide meeting rooms, host training courses, storage, child-care facilities — whatever the hospital needed. “Whatever it takes,” Watford’s chief executive, Scott Duxbury, said.

There have been countless gestures like Watford’s in the last two weeks, glimmers of kindness and empathy and care for society at large from a sport that is often — too often — accused of existing in a bubble of complacency and self-importance. They have come from clubs; Manchester United and Manchester City joining together to donate to a local food bank; Brighton offering free tickets to health care workers once the crisis abates and soccer is resumed. Almost every team has used its social media footprint to get the message out to stay at home. The contributions have come from players and coaches, too: Pep Guardiola, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Robert Lewandowski have all donated vast sums of money to hospitals or toward research to help the fight against the virus.

There are more, many more — too many to list, really, for fear of leaving one out. Players at Borussia Mönchengladbach and Leeds United have taken voluntary pay cuts to ensure other staff members are paid. West Bromwich Albion is among a number of teams that have promised to keep paying casual staff, the sort who work at the stadium on game days, even as there are no games to work. The response to this, of course, is that this is the least soccer can do.