On December 31, 2019, the World Health Organisation received the first reports of a previously-unknown virus behind a number of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. It took just a couple of weeks and the problem affected the whole World.
It took only about a week for social media posts to turn from fun-making to fear sharing. There were many critical voices about unnecessary panic. Football leagues were cancelling or postponing fixtures one after another till not much to watch remained. The knowledge we have today shows that the authorities did nothing you can label as “unnecessary panic”, but rather “slow reaction to a huge problem”.
From the charts above we clearly see how fast the football leagues representatives reacted. Graph is showing the dramatic increase of cancelled (and postponed) fixtures day by day reaching up to March 22. We estimate that over 95% of the cancelled football games are due to the Coronavirus outbreak.
Even better to see how the count of Scheduled and cancelled/postponed fixtures get close to each other on the next one.
How did the national Leagues react to the outbreak
We have seen how the responsible ones were trying hard to keep the leagues running at least behind the closed doors, but the danger was bigger than the will. The English Premier League was resisting but at the end made a smart decision and postponed the remaining fixtures to the future.
In the following list you see the information about the last fixtures played in World’s most watched leagues (Southern America not included). All of the leagues basically stopped in one week.
