How will the season pan out

Various reports are claiming that the Premier League have selected eight venues for matches to finish the season.
Nobody will play at their own ground, but at one of the other nearby stadiums, instead.
The grounds are those of Arsenal, West Ham, Leicester, Villa, Utd, City, Brighton and Southampton.
Wembley and St George's Park, the FA's training centre, will be used as backup.

That'll be a big nope from me.
The suggestion that out of town venues will be used to ensure easier social distancing doesn't seem to apply, either.
How is The Emirates out of town?

 

Supposedly clubs are warming to the idea of finishing the season behind closed doors...on the proviso that the threat of relegation is off the table

My suggestion is to say, okay, the season will be played behind closed doors - but with six teams relegated at the end of the season instead of three

 

Can Arsenal finish 15th?

 

You could promote the top three from the Championship and then have a curtailed season next year as follows....
Each team plays the other 22, 11 home and 11 away matches. At that point the table splits in two. The top 11 discard their points against the bottom 12 and complete their fixtures against the other 10. Similarly for the bottom 12.
So 32 matches for the top teams and 33 for the bottom ones. Six teams are relegated and three promoted bringing us back to normal.
Better than some arbitrary fix to this season.

 

Almost the way the Scottish Premiership operates

 

I disagree whole heartedly with playing matches behind closed doors, but can see the logic behind choosing the stadia that are out of town if matches are to be played. And using the London Stadium makes sense as it has no atmosphere anyway and is often virtually empty long before the final whistle.

 

As I'm currently leaning towards presuming that West Scam were the ones so adamant to complete the season with relegation off the table, I'm thinking any way to game the system so their options are to scrub the season or get relegated by their own petard is the best one...

 

Sky now suggesting the whole of next season to be played behind closed doors too - I wonder who are the main benificaries if this is the case!!

I would suggest that at least a whole season is a level playing field for teams unlike finishing this one behind closed doors. And the money that TV will pay to broadcast all the matches will keep the clubs afloat.

 

The part about their list of out of town stadiums is what gets me, not least because the Emiroids is a ten minute walk from my sister's house so is anything but "out of town"

Off the top of my head, the obvious candidates of actual out of town stadiums are

Wembley
The Taxpayer's Arena
King Power Arena
Pride Park
The Riverside
The Amex
stadium:mk (or whatever horrific use of cases and punctuation it has this season)

After that, you'd be amazed how not out of town these stadiums are, for example there's a row of houses right next to the Etihad, a row of houses next to Old Trafford, what appears to be a Barrett's project next to St Mary's, rows of houses on two sides of Villa Park...you get the point

And to be honest, somebody really needs to ask the Premier League this question: if it came down to it, would they really be happy to see the title lifted at a former hockey stadium that's only considered a football stadium because a dodgy millionaire dragged Wimbledon several hundred miles up the M1?

...of course, given The FA were willing to include st@dium:m.k in their failed World Cup package, that might not get the answer we were expecting

 

They can not decide the league placings fairly by moving to neutral venues, for example Spurs played away at Arsenal in a stadium full of partisan fans, then the reverse fixture would be played in front of nobody in a neutral stadium, removing any home advantage, that is not just. So it is not fair to relegate teams in these circumstances either, and if you remove relegation, then many teams would be just going through the motions with nothing to play for, which in turn unfairly affects teams going for European places, so why even bother.

It is one giant mess, there is no benefit in even considering completing the season other than financially. Prizes and relegations can not be decided or handed out fairly whatever happens, it is going to be an utter debacle if the money men that are pushing it get their way.

 

I agree with all of this, but the real question is if not this, then what. The circumstances we are in do not lend themselves to any fair solution and I guess we have to resolve on the least unfair one. Scrapping the season would involve repaying £1bn of sunk funds and will decimate (in the correct sense of destroying 1 in 10) clubs.

 

As far as the UEFA placings go for the PL this season, IMHO let the stats decide.

1. For each remaining fixture, the average result (W/L/D, GF/GA) of the
last 5 results between the two teams for the exact fixture are computed.

2. Once the final table is computed, that is your set of 2020-21 participants
(after removing Citeh from the table) .


Sufficient current PL clubs have a 'footprint' over the past decade to do #1
for the great majority of remaining fixtures. For those current clubs Y who
do not, you can compute the results for an incumbent club X by using the
results of the most recent exact fixtures for X against newly promoted clubs.

 

I assume that by all the red seats I have seen at games at the Library
over the past few seasons, the PL have deemed that the Goons
are demonstrating "best practice" when it comes to "social distancing" .

 

Luckily their stadium is out of town and doesn't have rows of houses on two sides of the stadium

Oh wait...

 

They could play their academy players as that league has been called off. They could reason it by saying they need those players to gain experience for next season as they can't afford to buy any new players.
As one headline said this morning- the teams at the bottom are holding the league to ransom-which again begs the question-WHY BOTHER?

 

So will these clubs get paid for the use of their stadia? (WH or the London Corp )
That's fair.............................not

 

And the 'fight' against the decisions in Europe have started...........

Ligue 1 club Amiens has launched a petition "to demand justice" after being relegated from the French top flight before the season could be completed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/52535393

 

Null and void will make the Kopites cry...so I’d say that’s the only real solution to this ‘problem’.

 

If that happens, the pl will have to pay Sky and BT huge sums back. So I think we can rule that out. Chairman would rather risk lives than that. Not ours obviously.

 

It also doesn't solve the issue of how to determine the next CL and EL qualifiers on sporting merit as required by UEFA. There is no fair way of doing that. The fairest way is probably finishing at neutral venues. The next fairest is probably going back to the table after 19 matches with small adjustments for the home and away imbalance.