⁍ UEFA: Bayern-Sevilla match with spectators is ‘pilot project’
Hungarian govt, UEFA to review match’s impact on COVID cases.

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⁍ UEFA want to ‘bring hope’ to football fans, respect safety.

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– For the first time ever, an international soccer game will feature fans inside a stadium as part of a review of the health impact of the Super Cup in Budapest, Hungary, on Thursday, Reuters reports. The game—between champions Sevilla of Spain and Bayern Munich of Germany—has been labeled Europe’s first major game open to fans amid the continent’s COVID-19 pandemic, which has sickened tens of thousands of people. Aleksander Ceferin, president of European soccer’s governing body, says the experiment is a “pilot project” and that the organization will decide what to do about future games once it knows the outcome of Thursday’s match. “In principle it will be us and the (Hungarian) government of course (to evaluate the health impact of the game) and in principle we trust the governments around Europe,” he says. “I think you know we are a very transparent organization and … it’s not us who decided spectators are allowed in the stadiums, but at the end it’s the decision of the government to allow us to do it.” The Hungarian government and Prime Minister Viktor Orban have declined to comment on the match’s health risks, even as experts and opposition politicians expressed frustration at being subjected to such an experiment. Orban, an avid football fan who has pledged billions of euros to a massive stadium building program, has yet to see a big international competitive game in the newly completed Puskas Stadium. “We will have 16,000 spectators. It’s not even 30% (of the stadium’s nominal capacity: 67,000.”