The Daily Bee: Uli Hoeness Shares Thoughts on England’s Covid Situation

Good Morning Fear The Wall

Uli Hoeness may be retired but he still knows how to grab the headlines when he wants to. He has recently been talking to Kicker, and he had plenty to say about plenty, just as we’ve come to expect from the former Bayern boss, but the part that particularly caught my eye is when he gave his thoughts on the Covid situation in England.

Uli’s statements about the situation in England perhaps fail to acknowledge the latest rise in Covid cases across Europe, as Omicron becomes the dominant variant. Covid started to spike early in England, but a lot of Western Europe has followed since. While Germany has avoided the worst of it so far, they may well find it reaching them pretty soon! I’m not sure I’d attribute the latest spread of the virus to the stadiums being full, nor the pubs in reality. That said, I do think he’s right to criticize the British government’s failure to respond to Covid over the course of the pandemic, and I did quite enjoy his comments about Boris in particular!

Finally, while Derek Rae is right to point out that English and German politics are quite different, I think a lot of the replies seem to have taken that statement and run with it. Politics in England and Germany are structurally fundamentally different, due to the nature of institutional design in both countries, which makes negative partisanship a much stronger feature in English politics than in Germany.

In all honesty Hoeness’s comments don’t really matter, but when do they ever? I’m sure he said many more interesting things than this in his Kicker interview, but there’s also basically no football news that seems worth covering right now, so here you go.

The Daily Buzz

What are your thoughts about Southampton’s takeover by Serb Dragan Solak? Exciting times ahead (or it’ll be the same as usual, who knows).