In Pausing Their Sport, Soccer’s Leaders Put Everyone on the Clock

on soccer UEFA moved back the Euros, which was helpful. But setting a hard deadline for its leagues to make up for lost time will only cause new problems. MANCHESTER, England — Power, it turned out, was the problem: Who had it, who wanted it, who would get to keep it. Remove that, and present those who scrapped and bickered and threatened to paralyze soccer over it with something they could not barter or bully, and suddenly all the hard, red lines turned a soft, dusky pink.

The powerless are in no place to argue over problems. In the space of five days — though it has felt far, far longer than that — soccer has discovered a spirit of “unity. ” Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, the game’s governing body, has noticed it. So, too, has Aleksander Ceferin, his counterpart at UEFA, the organization that oversees European soccer.

Somehow, it has only been a week or so since they were together in Amsterdam, at UEFA’s annual congress, the former offering an olive branch and the latter responding with a flex — posturing and peacocking that now seems to belong to another place, another world. Back then, over there, FIFA and UEFA were at loggerheads, over control, over money, over everything. They were not the only ones: the clubs had their agenda, the leagues had theirs. Neither seemed especially concerned by what the players wanted, and nobody ever bothered to ask the fans.

The organizers wanted more tournaments, or more of their tournament; more games, more prizes, more of everything, more of anything. And then, as Juventus and Inter Milan and Real Madrid and Arsenal went into lockdown because of the coronavirus, and then as leagues across the world shuttered the doors, it became obvious the issue was no longer that there needed to be more, but that there would not be any, not for some time. There was no use, now, squabbling over power, not when it was clear, even to them, that something else was in control. That powerlessness has yielded soccer’s new sense of unity.

Over the weekend, representatives of all the sport’s stakeholders pored over contracts and ran numbers and held talks; just as important, it seems some of them might have listened, too. By the time UEFA convened the first of its conference calls this week — first with Europe’s leagues and clubs, then with the Continent’s national associations — the framework of a plan was in place. This summer’s men’s European championship would have to be postponed, as has been blindingly obvious for some time, and played out in the same locations, and under roughly the same time frame, next year. Various other tournaments — the European under-21 championships, the Nations League finals and the women’s European championships — are expected to shift backward to accommodate it.