Blackpool CEO anticipates players would play again this season if required

A meeting of all EFL clubs has been convened for Tuesday, when proposals for ending the season without playing out all remaining fixtures will be debated.

Blackpool’s players have been at home since March and are training individually, though the club felt it important to gauge their views.

Chief executive Ben Mansford told BBC Radio Lancashire: “As soon as (head coach) Neil Critchley and I were asked to go on calls about whether we were going to start, we asked Jay Spearing (club captain) and Mark Howard (PFA representative) to get all the players on a Zoom call and talk about it because it’s the players who have to be as comfortable as they can be.

“The general vibe from our group was that if we gave them the assurance we would do all we were being asked to do to make them as safe as possible, I think our players would return.

“However, playing the remaining games this season would, I think, cost most League One and Two clubs in the region of half a million pounds and that is a huge amount of financial exposure without the chances of anything coming back in.

“The testing alone will cost in the region of £150,000, bringing staff off furlough and back into that environment is probably a similar amount. The ‘Return to Training’ document is 50 pages long and the protocols of adhering to that are very onerous.

“I think the players would like to get back if we asked them to come back, and we could do all the Government are asking, but I think the financial realities of coming back probably mean more than 50 per cent of League One clubs will vote to end the season.

“The Premier League and Championship want to finish and over £400m a year is injected into the football pyramid via the Premier League’s broadcasting and commercial deals, so it’s really important that they finish.

“The Championship feel they need to finish because they take home 80 per cent of the EFL’s broadcasting and commercial deals.”