Matt Maher: A year without fans is more than enough for football

It was while leaving the Karaiskaki Stadium following the first leg of the Europa League quarter-final between Wolves and Olympiacos I recall remarking to a colleague how I never again wanted to cover a game without supporters.

Sadly, that wish turned out to be somewhat forlorn. Tonight’s match between Villa and Everton will be my 54th behind closed doors, with a noon kick-off at Selhurst Park on Sunday (thank you very much Premier League fixture schedulers) the 55th and – hopefully – the last.

Just because next week’s return of supporters might be limited in scope doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be celebrated loudly and recognised as unquestionably the biggest step yet on the game’s journey back toward normality.

Football has survived without fans. The fixture list has been fulfilled and this season will appear in the record books. Titles have been won. Trophies have been and will be lifted. Careers and lives have been altered by results.

Yet in many respects this will be remembered as a lost campaign. For fans of Albion and Fulham, who last saw their teams in the flesh at a time when they were fighting for promotion, it is the Premier League season which never happened. So many big moments have been missed.

Slaven Bilic, for example, will never feel the full adulation deserved for leading the Baggies back to the top flight. Players like Conor Townsend and Semi Ajayi, who worked so hard to realise their dream of playing in the Premier League, have experienced a rather unsatisfactory version. Granted, they were in a position to do something about it and ensure Albion stuck around for longer than one year. Still, it is hard not to have just a little sympathy.

For clubs, the reopening of stadiums also represents a first tentative step into the unknown. Whether fans will return in the same number as before Covid-19 has been a question everyone has pondered. Though ticket ballots for next week’s matches have been oversubscribed across the board, only next season will we really begin to get a clearer picture of the pandemic’s long-term impact.

Some of the ticket pricing for matches doubling as social experiments, it must be said, won’t have swayed those feeling their time and money might be better used elsewhere.

But if the future remains uncertain, at least one unhappy chapter in football’s history is about to close.