The Champions League fixture against Liverpool was the last major soccer game to be played in England before the coronavirus shutdown.
The city council of Liverpool has announced it will look into Liverpool’s Champions League match in opposition to Atletico Madrid at Anfield for any possible impact it had on the coronavirus crisis.
The March eleven fixture was the final major soccer game to be played in England before the coronavirus shutdown, with 52,000 fans turning up at Anfield which include 3,000 traveling supporters from Madrid.
Many called for the game to be postponed with Madrid already in a partial lockdown at the time, however it went in advance with the visitors prevailing in the last-16 second-leg tie.
“Liverpool City Council, alongside partners at the University of Liverpool and John Moores University, have agreed to discover any impact of Covid-19 as a result of the Atletico Madrid match at Anfield on eleven March,” a statement read.
“Liverpool City Council’s public health team, alongside partners, is presently assessing the dimension and scope of the project.
As the city’s current center of attention is very much on dealing with the pandemic, no timescale or date has yet been set for the completion of the work and when it will be reported.”
The announcement came one day after the mayor of Liverpool City Region Steve Rotheram called for an inquiry, saying the match need to have never gone ahead.
“If people have contracted coronavirus as a direct end result of a sporting event that we believe shouldn’t have taken place, well that is scandalous,” Rotheram instructed BBC Sport.
“That’s put not just those people in danger, however those frontline group of workers in the NHS and others in their own families that might also have contracted it.”
The impact of Champions League matches on the coronavirus pandemic in Europe has already been demonstrated by Atalanta’s February win over Valencia, a game that is now being referred to as ‘Partita Zero’ (Game Zero), and a “biological bomb.”
The match, which took place in Milan, is in all likelihood a major factor in the Bergamo region being one of the hardest hit by Covid-19 in Italy, with heaps of fans traveling from Valencia and exchanging the virus with supporters from Italy.
“The aggregation of thousands of people, centimetres from each other, attractive in manifestations of euphoria like hugging, shouting, all of that could’ve favoured viral reciprocation,” immunologist Francesco Le Foche informed Corriere dello Sport.
