Saturday, November 27th, 2021
DFL boss Seifert makes the announcement
86 football professionals are still unvaccinated
With tens of thousands of new infections every day, the pandemic in Germany is taking on terrifying proportions. But some football professionals decided against the protective spades. DFL boss Seifert has no understanding for this, but he considers compulsory vaccination to be the wrong approach.
Of the more than 1000 German contract footballers in the Bundesliga and the 2nd Bundesliga, 86 have not yet been vaccinated. This is the number given by the CEO of the German Football League (DFL), Christian Seifert, in an interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. Seifert made it clear in the conversation that he had “absolutely no understanding of someone not being vaccinated.” For professional footballers, too, “what applies to all citizens from my point of view: get yourselves vaccinated!” At the same time, the Bundesliga boss defends himself with clear words against the considerations of several prime ministers to introduce a statutory vaccination requirement for professional football.
The state chiefs of Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, Markus Söder from the CSU and Hendrik Wüst, also CDU, had recently expressed such considerations. “In view of the more than 70,000 new infections a day in some cases, I am already wondering whether there aren’t more pressing problems in the country than 86 unvaccinated footballers,” says Seifert of the SZ. “To this day we do not even have a compulsory vaccination in medicine or for teachers, but now the officials in the health and labor ministries should deal with whether a law will be drafted for 86 people?”
“That sounds a bit like Game of Thrones”
The DFL boss considers this to be populism: “In my opinion, since the beginning of the corona pandemic, there has always been too much about signs and too little about the real problems and possible solutions,” he says. Every now and then he had the feeling that “some individuals also use professional football to get into the media or to distract attention from other things”.
In the SZ interview, Seifert also comments on the leadership crisis and the ongoing quarrels in the German Football Association (DFB), which is looking for a new president after Fritz Keller’s resignation. Ultimately, it “doesn’t matter who is the next DFB President based on the current structures and responsibilities,” says Seifert, who is also DFB Vice President through his position at the DFL.
“The DFB is a dysfunctional system that needs a structural change.” As an example, he cites the anachronistic office of treasurer from his point of view: “That sounds a bit like Game of Thrones”. Seifert therefore suggests “thinking about the organizational structure of the DFB”.