WSJ | The NCAA tournament. Major League Baseball opening day. The Masters
golf tournament. The NFL draft, the NBA and NHL playoffs, the Boston
Marathon and Olympic qualifiers all over the U.S.
The busiest time of the American sports calendar is coming—if the coronavirus doesn’t come first.
As the global economy braces for the
potentially devastating effects of a novel coronavirus that is spreading
around the world, few businesses are at greater risk of being impacted
than sports.
This is a multibillion-dollar industry built on live
entertainment, easy travel and mass gatherings, and that makes it
especially vulnerable if major cities begin to embrace social
distancing, as they have in countries where the virus has already
disrupted everyday life. The problem is that there is no work-from-home
in sports. The NBA season can’t be played on Slack.
Should games be canceled? Can they be delayed? Will they be played in
empty arenas? These are the questions that leagues and governing bodies
are scrambling to answer as they size up potentially the biggest disruption
to the sports calendar since World War II, and they are constrained by
uncertainty as they make contingency plans to keep up with this
mysterious pathogen. Their behavior will be dictated by the virus’s.
“It will give March Madness a new meaning,” said Dr. William
Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.
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