FIFA to allow each country to extend season and transfer window as it wishes

By Tony Attwood

This story is jumping from newspaper to newspaper in England, and seems to have originated in the Athletic.  The Mail, Sun, Standard, Mirror all have it, although interestingly the heavyweight papers such as the Guardian, Telegraph and Times don’t run it.   Their last comment was from last month when they said things such as “Fifa could keep next transfer window open as far as January”.

This is actually a very common divide among the English newspapers.  The heavyweights take a more considered approach with reference to what passes for reality among sports reporters, while the popular papers pick up whatever story is out there and the rest of the mob reproduce it without thought and without checking.  Thus is propagated fake news.  If, as usual, it all turns out to be untrue, no one apologises.  It is all just left and tucked away until next time.

In this case, the original source seems to be The Athletic, so it will be particularly interesting to see if this one is right.  If so, then hats of to that publication for having a mole inside Fifa.   In the coming days or weeks, we shall see.

So just in case this one is not simple tittle-tattle, here are the details.

Each country will be left to decide when to restart football, and players with contracts running out on 30 June will be allowed to extend their current contracts through negotiations with the clubs to cover the extended season.

In effect, the regulation will mean that the current season will have no official end, and each country can take as long as it likes to get to the conclusion of the campaign.   That does of course then leave the problem of a disjointed start to the 2020/1 season, but in many ways we get that already with clubs competing in the extra preliminary preview additional extra round of the European competitions starting in July.

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