Half an hour after Thiago Alcántara, the otherwise so calm, level-headed professional of FC Bayern, who was inconspicuous next to the soccer field, angrily asked to stop fooling around, Hansi Flick and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge enter the club’s press room. You will say serious, worried sentences later. But first of all, they’re silly.
“Are you all tested?” Flick asks the journalists present, whose arrival was limited, only eleven are present. Shortly thereafter, Rummenigge sits on the podium, saying: “Don’t get too close to us.” Then he laughs.
At FC Bayern, they are at a loss
FC Bayern is the largest German football club, it is the nation’s leading club. On Friday afternoon you can see on a small scale how German professional football as a whole lacks a clear stance in dealing with the corona virus. At FC Bayern, too, they are at a loss, and at FC Bayern, too, they hope to the end that their everyday football life will be restricted as little as possible.
When Rummenigge and Flick come to the press room, they assume that the matchday will take place this weekend, they are preparing for an away game at Union Berlin, Flick wants to tackle the game “professionally”; it is the look of a soccer teacher. “It makes sense”, says CEO Rummenigge, that the German Football League (DFL) decided in the morning not to take a break until after this matchday; it’s a businessman’s look.
And then there is the look of Thiago Alcántara, whose nature does not tend to panic – his look is that of a worried father, a worried son; it is the look of a concerned person. “This is crazy,” he tweets in English at noon on the DFL’s preliminary decision. “Please stop fooling around and arrive in reality. Let’s face it, there are a lot more important priorities than any sport.”
Half an hour after Thiago’s tweet, Flick and Rummenigge spoke a lot about the famous social responsibility of football. Rummenigge praised several times how the politicians in Berlin and Munich reacted to the crisis, which had so far been “extraordinarily remarkable”. He therefore finds it “extremely important that we first follow the guidelines and recommendations of politics”. On Friday lunchtime, Flick and Rummenigge decided to follow these recommendations by continuing to prepare for a soccer game.
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