Sports Big Business No. 2820, welcome to pay attention to the leading sports industry information platform
Wen | Lin Yuan
Sports big business reporter
On February 23, according to the famous sports journalist Li Zhenbo, the Chinese Football Association sent a letter to the club - it is planned to start restoring the regular home and away format of the 2022 season of the Chinese Super League, The Chinese First Division and the Chinese Second Division in April on the basis of the normalization of epidemic prevention and control!
As soon as the news came out, the fans boiled: "Happiness is back!" "Ready to grab tickets!" "At the extreme, even if it is an empty field, at least it is a big step forward." Some fans also cried: "Finally open the stadium, the home team is going to be gone." "Basketball wipes away tears at this moment."
The epidemic has had a devastating impact on the sports industry, especially the competition performance industry, and many events have fallen into a vicious circle of postponement and cancellation. The successful holding of the Beijing Winter Olympics at the beginning of 2022 has made it possible for domestic sports events to restart the offline scene, and the professional football league will take the lead in restoring home and away games or will inject a shot in the arm for the industry.
Big positives! The FA intends to fully restore home and away
After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, most fans across the country have not had a home viewing experience for more than two years. The pent-up demand for offline spectators has led to a downturn in the ball market and population loss, and the resumption of home and away games in the three-tier professional leagues and ensuring the integrity of the schedule have become the main demands of the industry.
According to the "Beijing Youth Daily" report, the Chinese Football Association and the China Football Federation Preparatory Group recently discussed with the representatives of professional clubs at all levels of the Chinese Super League, China League A and China Second Division a four-set plan from wide to narrow, the most ideal plan is to "fully restore the home and away format", the first and second half of the use of mirror matchmaking, in the form of "17 + 17" to complete the double round robin.
The resumption of home and away is undoubtedly a blessing for major football clubs. At present, 80% of Chinese Super League clubs have wage arrears, and opening the stadium will help clubs alleviate the cash flow crisis to a certain extent.
After the issuance of the "Model Contract for the Government entrusting social forces to operate public sports venues (reference text)" issued by the General Administration of Sport, clubs have the opportunity to realize the socialized operation and management of the stadium in the new season, improve the commercial supporting facilities of the stadium, and increase the income inside and outside the stadium.
The significance of restoring home and away is also to conduct stress tests for the 2023 Asian Cup football match. As the host of the Asian Cup, China's new and reconstructed football stadiums in the ten host cities need to be tested through the competition for epidemic prevention and spectators. The hosting of the professional football triathlon will undoubtedly help straighten out the details of preparations for next year's Asian Cup.
Chengdu Phoenix Mountain Stadium
Putting aside the variable of the epidemic, after the Guangzhou team announced the salary cut, the domestic professional football talent market was in a turbulent period. Some teams have begun to use youth and even youth echelon members to directly promote to the first team to remedy, and restoring home and away games may allow youth football to "roll up".
Recently, Henan Songshan Longmen recruited four U21 and U19 echelon players to the first team; The Chinese Second Division Kunming Zheng He Boatman organized a U15/16 echelon and a first-team teaching competition, and the U16 echelon age-appropriate players were raised to the first team. The club said that the parents of the players expressed understanding and support for the club's decision.
For clubs, the recruitment of young echelon players may be a temporary measure to supplement the talent gap, but for the majority of parents, the opportunity to let their children participate in sports or even play low-level professional leagues in secondary school will be a plus for their studies. In addition, Wu Lei was only 14 years old and 10 months old when he landed in the Second Division in 2006, and his record of "youngest professional player" was broken by many parents who wanted their children to break.
From the perspective of the general trend, since the beginning of this year, many provincial key and municipal key middle schools have targeted professional football clubs. Chengdu No. 7 Middle School has reached a cooperation with Chengdu Rongcheng Club, Shanghai Maple Leaf International School has joined hands with Shanghai Shenhua, and Nanjing Yuhuatai Middle School has signed a contract with Nanjing City FC. On the one hand, these schools hope to build school football classes and football teams with professional standards, and on the other hand, they hope to send talents to local professional football. Schools and parents are secretly pushing for the "inner roll" of youth football, and the resumption of home and away in the third division and the entry of children into the stadium are undoubtedly what they are looking forward to.
The new season will start on April 23 and end on November 13 ( about a week before the start of the World Cup in Qatar). In the end, whether the home and away games can be restored depends on the dynamics of the epidemic and the results of communication between various departments. To get approved, a lot of meticulous work is required.
According to the details of the documents released by the news, the requirements for home and away games in the league area are relatively cumbersome, such as the need for the relevant departments of the local municipal government to issue a letter of consent to undertake, and the need to submit home and standby home information. For smaller teams, especially those in the lower leagues, it can mean that in addition to cumbersome procedures, it will also increase the cost of the event.
The FA resumed home-and-away correspondence
However, in general, no matter which set of home-and-away plans are finally adopted under the consultation of all parties, compared with the previous two years of the tournament system, it will boost the recovery of domestic professional football leagues, accelerate the resumption of work and production of national sports events, and further drive the recovery of the sports consumer market.
There are zero infections among the winter Olympic spectators and the marathon is intensive
A resurgence in the competition performance industry is just around the corner?
The Beijing Winter Olympics is the first large-scale international sports event held in Chinese mainland since the outbreak of the epidemic, and it is also the first international event in China to bring spectators to the stadium in 2022, and the organizing committee has ensured that there is no cluster epidemic with perfect epidemic prevention measures, and there is not a single case of positive covid-19 among tens of thousands of spectators.
The spectator seat of the Winter Olympics Grand Jumping Platform
The opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games and the spectators of the competition are all directional organizations. Spectators are required to undergo health monitoring and nucleic acid testing before entering the venue, and enter and exit the venue through separate entrance and exit passages. The event unified the ticketing information to the cloud, so that the time required by the audience in the ticket verification link of the venue was reduced to 1.5 seconds, which minimized the gathering of the audience; in the opening and closing ceremonies and other scenes, the scene also distributed masks, disinfectant wipes and other epidemic prevention materials to tens of thousands of spectators. According to the regulations, all spectators who have entered the closed loop in Beijing and Zhangshan will go through one week of health monitoring and two nucleic acid tests after returning home, and at the same time, they can go to work and school normally.
Dr. Zhang Wenhong commented that the anti-epidemic work of the Beijing Winter Olympics "showed surprising wisdom". He pointed out that the Beijing Winter Olympics "abolished international travel quarantine under specific circumstances, bridged the gap between countries in international epidemic prevention and control strategies, and maintained the balance between zero-clearing policies and international exchanges to the greatest extent." Through a 'closed-loop' system that is both closed and precisely open, the number of cases has dropped significantly and the spread of the virus has been minimized. ”
Winter Olympic audience admission scene
It can be said that the textbook epidemic prevention work of the Beijing Winter Olympics not only provides reference experience for the preparation of the next Chengdu Universiade and Hangzhou Asian Games, but also demonstrates the restart of sports events in various places.
In terms of the traffic arrival and departure links of the Beijing Winter Olympics alone, the capital airport has specially opened up parking spaces, areas, passages and streamlines. From January 23 to February 23, the total number of people entering the Olympics at Beijing Capital Airport reached 13,754. This figure far exceeds the traffic flow of any domestic sports event in two years, which is enough to show that the mainland has the conditions to host more events.
The first to respond was the road running industry. According to the Notice of the General Office of the General Administration of Sport on Further Improving the Safety and Stability of the Near-term Sports Field and the Notice of the Chinese Athletics Association on Reaffirming the Safety and Stability of Recent Road Running Events and Activities, marathon events in various places may be restarted after March 2022. With the successful conclusion of the Beijing Winter Olympics, there is good news in various places at present.
Xiamen Haicang Half Horse, Wuxi Marathon, Fenghua Cross-Strait Peach Blossom Marathon, etc. are all set on March 20, Hainan Oriental Half Horse Organizing Committee announced that the event will start on March 27, and marathons around the world will be intensively attacked on weekends.
A few days ago, the Xiamen Marathon Organizing Committee issued an announcement that the preparations for the 2022 Xiamen Marathon are in full swing, the event will start on April 10, and the pre-registration will open at 10:00 a.m. on February 28, and the scale of the competition has not yet been announced.
As an IAAF platinum standard event, the Xiamen Marathon can be described as the bellwether of china's marathon. Affected by the epidemic in 2021, the Xiamen Marathon was urgently stopped before the start of the race, and then postponed to April, and the national marathon event was intensively crashed for a time.
Xiama restarts
The announcement of the restart of a number of marathon events indicates that the national road running market will soon return to active again. In the past two years, many events have consolidated more flexible forms of running competitions such as online races, and it is believed that with the gradual recovery of offline marathons, running will become a normalized mainstream sports event option like e-sports.
As Dr. Zhang Wenhong said, "Although there are sporadic or even small-scale clusters of cases in many places in China, they also quickly return to calm, which is generally called 'social clearance'. ”
There is reason to believe that in the process of strictly implementing normalized epidemic prevention and control measures in various places, domestic large-scale international events will continue to advance steadily, local events will bloom, and the spring of China's sports competition performance industry will eventually come.
Note: The images used in this article are from the Internet