The sudden Covid outbreaks at clubs threatens to derail the busy festive programme with fears of another shutdown
Midnight on Monday is an unusual hour to announce a fixture postponement. Manchester United would not be playing Brentford on Tuesday, a Premier League statement with a timestamp of 23:53 said, because of “an ongoing Covid-19 outbreak within Manchester United’s squad”. If the news had to be released under the cover of darkness, it was tempting to wonder, how ongoing might the outbreak actually be?
Clubs do not publish data on Covid cases within their squads and the Premier League doesn’t breakdown its division-wide stats, either. But earlier on Monday a record number of positives across the league had been confirmed, 42 in a week, so it was possible to imagine that the United outbreak was indeed substantial.
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