Tuesday, November 23, 2021
New worries for Kimmich and Co.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, unvaccinated professionals face a forced break
According to the state’s new Corona Protection Ordinance, unvaccinated or not otherwise immunized football professionals should no longer be allowed to play in North Rhine-Westphalia under certain conditions. That would not only have consequences for FC Bayern.
The pressure on unvaccinated football professionals continues to grow: According to the Corona Protection Ordinance of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, which will apply from Wednesday, the 2G rule should also apply to professional athletes when exercising their profession. Regardless of whether you are under contract with a club in the most populous federal state, or whether you are traveling with a foreign team. For players like Joshua Kimmich, Serge Gnabry and colleagues, who recently had to be in quarantine for the second time within a short period of time due to contact with an infected person, that would mean that their club would play an away game at Borussia Dortmund, Bayer Leverkusen, Arminia Bielefeld , Borussia Mönchengladbach, VfL Bochum or 1. FC Köln are not available.
For amateur athletes, the regulation applies immediately when the new ordinance comes into force, but for professional athletes who have neither been vaccinated nor recovered, there is at least a little time to think about it: “For participants in professional leagues, leagues and competitions of an association who is a member of the German Olympic Sports Confederation is “, so it says in the text of the regulation,” is “temporarily as a replacement for immunization, a test evidence according to § 2 paragraph 8 sentence 2 on the basis of a PCR test sufficient.” However, the length of this transition period is not defined.
FC Bayern, which currently has five unvaccinated professionals in quarantine with Joshua Kimmich, Serge Gnabry, Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting, Jamal Musiala and Michael Cuisance, has to travel to Dortmund for the Bundesliga top game on December 4th. After that, relevant away games in Cologne (January 15) and Bochum (February 12) are on the agenda this season. The 2G regulation of the Protection Ordinance applies as soon as the incidence of hospitalization in NRW – i.e. the number of hospital admissions in seven days per 100,000 inhabitants – is above 3.0. It is currently at 4.22. The 2G rule already applies to spectators at Bundesliga games.
However, whether the regulation can be implemented under labor law is controversial. The sports and labor lawyer Martin Schimke considers them “difficult to implement”. “Because that is disproportionate due to the high vaccination rate among the players,” said the expert. According to information from the German Football League, almost ten percent of the footballers in the 36 clubs in the first and second division should not be vaccinated. In addition, compared to carers, for example, the players are not in contact with vulnerable groups, added Schimke. Participation in games is currently based on the various hygiene protection concepts of the various professional leagues.
The pressure is growing at FC Bayern
Most recently, FC Bayern Munich, among others, had made it increasingly clear that it would like to sanction the attitude of its employees. Applying the new regulation would further increase the pressure. As the “Bild am Sonntag” reported, all Bayern players who have to be quarantined because of a missing corona vaccination will no longer be paid by the club during this time. The professionals lose several hundred thousand euros, depending on their salary.
The former chairman of the board, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, had declared that it was “a debate that is slowly becoming annoying for the association. Everyone has tried to clear up the issue of non-vaccination or to find a solution. That has not yet succeeded,” argued Rummenigge. Sky “. He knew “from a reliable source” from many conversations with the previously unvaccinated professionals at FC Bayern. “Corona occupies the whole club and the team,” said Rummenigge.
Bayern coach Julian Nagelsmann had previously urged Kimmich and Co. to get vaccinated. The risk is “on the platter. The numbers are frightening. We notice it with us too. There are always problem cases,” he said. Nagelsmann puts the annoying topic more and more to the table. “It annoys and occupies you. Nobody asks anything about Augsburg, we only talk about the pandemic,” he said, adding emphatically: “I am a trainer and not employed as a pandemic officer.” It is only about “2G and 3G. It binds a lot of thoughts, there is a lot of discussion. The pandemic is not letting go of us.”