It is a peculiar time for professional footballers without the carrot of a match at the end of a week. Last Saturday Wycombe Wanderers were due to travel to Burton Albion but, with every Football League match suspended until April owing to coronavirus, David Wheeler ended up spending 90 minutes not on the pitch but on the sofa, bingeing on episodes of All or Nothing, a behind-the-scenes docu‑series centred on Manchester City. “You train nearly every day for 10 months of the year, so geared towards a particular goal and, especially for the teams that are at the top end or bottom end of the table, it’s very high-emotion, high levels of dedication and concentration at this point of the season and so for it to be frozen in time is very, very strange,” the 29-year-old winger says.
Wycombe are eighth in League One but three points off an automatic promotion place with the climax of a unique season still to play out. Some clubs have shut up shop, leaving players to train in isolation, some are training sporadically after deep cleans, having introduced stringent measures on hygiene, particularly in gym areas, while for others it is close to business as usual as they await further government advice or updates from the game’s governing bodies.
“It’s a waiting game,” says Wheeler. “As a professional athlete you get itchy feet having a few hours indoors – let alone days on end. It is very difficult to stay fit in relevance to football, because you can go for a jog but it’s not the same as football fitness. The way it is looking, with the amount of time we’re going to be off, I’d imagine for health and safety of the players, we’re going to have to have almost a mini pre-season before we set up for the last games because otherwise people will pick up muscle injuries from muscle wastage from sitting around for so long.”
Football, and indeed sport, did not seem to wake up to the crisis until the Arsenal manager, Mikel Arteta, tested positive for the virus – “there was a definite gear change when that happened, which is ridiculous” – and, even then, some National League games continued to be played in front of, in many cases, increased crowds. “It was pretty staggering that some non-league clubs were still playing when the league clubs had decided it was too dangerous. I think it comes from the top and the decision needs to be taken out of people’s hands. It’s like with cafes, pubs and restaurants: the government has told everyone to not go but they haven’t said ‘you have to shut’ so businesses will go under unless they change tack and do something about it.”
Boredom does not concern Wheeler, a sports science graduate from Brunel University who arrived in professional football aged 22 at Exeter City after playing part-time for Lewes and Staines Town – “I’ve got loads of books on backlog to read and films to watch” – but he believes the absence of matches and formal training schedules could seriously affect others. “You almost lose your purpose a little bit, because there’s no direction to what you’re doing at the minute. There is often a lot of talk about players that get injured or are not involved that spend days on end sitting at home and end up getting hooked on gambling or other addictions. If they thought it was bad before, it is going to be a hell of a lot worse in the next few months. Are the players really being looked after? I would argue a lot more can be done. I would argue that it’s way past the need for more mental‑health provision and psychological help to players within clubs.”
Wheeler is at pains to point out that drawing parallels between the National Health Service and football would be wrong but believes there is a concerning theme of papering over the cracks. “With the NHS, it [the impact of coronavirus] is going to expose the underfunding and understaffing when the going gets tough and, when things get really bad, that’s going to be exposed. Cracks are going to be exposed and expand in this crisis, and you’re going to see that in probably every industry but the NHS is going to be the most stark because people’s lives are at stake but I think you will see that in every industry where there is any vulnerability. I quite like the phrase ‘fix the roof while the sun is shining’ and to fund the NHS to a better degree than it has been would have insulated the potential casualties we’ll see in coming months. Now the shit is going to hit the fan and we haven’t got enough [resources] to look after everyone.”
Wheeler joined Wycombe last summer after loan spells away from Queens Park Rangers, whom he joined in 2017, at MK Dons and Portsmouth and, from his experience, he believes the virus will have serious implications for clubs, particularly those that were in precarious positions before the suspension of fixtures and needed gate-receipt income. “There will be plenty of clubs that are built on a house of cards, and you only have to look at the examples in recent history of Bury and Bolton to realise it doesn’t take a lot to knock some of these clubs over and something like this is way, way above what any club could have expected.
“It’s very much short-termism in football, very much here and now and every club seems to throw as much money as they can at trying to win the league, get promoted or get into the play-offs because essentially for players, staff and, sometimes the owners, it’s about this season and this season only. Sometimes it’s only about the next few months, because leagues like the Championship are so volatile. Clubs are not insulated for things like this.”