Brighton’s chief executive, Paul Barber, has urged Premier League clubs to follow the Bundesliga’s lead and rethink proposals to complete the season at neutral venues.
“If Germany can, why can’t we?” said Barber, who believes the English top flight could resume behind closed doors with home and away matches, as planned in Germany from 16 May.
Brighton and clubs below them have opposed neutral venues but Barber claimed there were concerns at all levels of the league about a measure wanted by the police and government.
“I don’t think it’s a big-six clubs v bottom-six clubs issue,” said Barber, who added it was unfair to paint clubs opposing the proposal, including Aston Villa, as “the bad guys”. Mark Roberts, the police’s national football lead, told ITV that clubs against neutral venues needed to “get a grip”, citing the “broader context where the country has seen 30,000 and rising deaths”.
Barber is adamant the season could be completed with home and away matches. “We’ve got some of the best stadiums in the world, some of the best-run football clubs in the world, one of the best leagues in the world with great administrators. Why can’t we make it happen in our country and finish the season the way it started? In terms of the operational, commercial, health and safety [challenges], I think we can manage ourselves.
“In terms of fans at the stadium, if Liverpool are playing away from Anfield [at a neutral stadium] I totally understand why operationally it would logically follow that Liverpool fans wouldn’t turn up to wherever Liverpool were playing. But personally I would back my own staff to make our stadium operationally safe and secure. It is already operating as a Covid-19 testing centre, which is entirely secure and very safe for everyone that is working there, so I would back us to do that and I back our fans and trust our fans to stay away.
“I would be very comfortable with that scenario. I think it has to be looked at again, otherwise we will have an impasse and it will create another delay and more difficulty and we don’t want that. We want to return to playing, we want to finish the season and do so when it’s safe and when it’s fair.”
Top-flight clubs will reconvene on Monday to determine how the season could be restarted, with neutral venues likely to be high on the agenda. “I think clubs at every level of the league have concerns about neutral venues,” Barber said. “I think there are clubs at different levels of the league that have an issue with neutral venues and I think there is concern about the fairness element.
“The reality is we are three-quarters of the way through the season, [some] teams have got a large number of home games left or a small number of games left, they have got big teams to play and smaller teams to play. In our case we have got four of the six biggest clubs not just in the league but in Europe [Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal] and, at our ground, traditionally we have done OK against those teams. We have built our training ground over the last four or five years, spending tens of millions of pounds, to replicate stadium conditions as best as we can.”