Graham Potter is likely to be made to wait once again for his debut Premier League match in charge of Chelsea, with this weekend's game against Liverpool highly likely to be postponed due to the Queen’s funeral.
Potter was appointed as the new Chelsea manager on Thursday following the sacking of Thomas Tuchel. His first press conference as Blues boss was postponed following the Queen’s death aged 96 last week, while Chelsea’s local derby against Fulham on Saturday was also pushed back as a mark of respect.
Potter will take charge of Chelsea for the first time for their Champions League match against Red Bull Salzburg at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday evening. But the following Premier League match against Liverpool, which is slated for broadcast on Sky Sports at 4.30pm on Sunday, has been plunged into doubt because of policing concerns.
Premier League clubs have undertaken meetings on Monday morning to discuss the upcoming round of fixtures to determine if they can go ahead days before the Queen’s state funeral at Westminster Abbey at 11am on Monday. But Mirror Football understands that Chelsea’s chances of fulfilling their fixture are looking increasingly slim, with moving the game elsewhere also full of problems.
Some 10,000 police officers are set to be deployed in London over the weekend to ensure safety at events planned during the 10-day mourning period for the Queen and to celebrate the accession of King Charles III. Those demands will push an already overstretched police force to the brink and mean high-profile football matches could be postponed.
According to the latest figures from the government, there are 140,228 police officers in the 43 forces across England and Wales. But the number of those officers who have received special training to be part of Police Support Units (PSUs) on matchdays is much fewer and means fixtures which have been deemed higher risk could well face postponement due to a lack of available officers.
Geoff Pearson, professor of law at the University of Manchester and an expert in policing football matches, says that the unprecedented nature of the current situation means football matches could well be sacrificed.
“Police support units are drawn out of officers who are trained in the basics of riot management, who will be drawn from their normal policing duties,” he told Mirror Football . “These will be officers who will normally be on neighbourhood patrols, responding to 999 calls, or involved in specialist operations. So you have to plan how you can draw these officers out of normal everyday policing to police these football matches. And for big matches, particularly for the smaller forces, this can pose a huge logistical challenge.”
The scale of the issue was hinted at by the Football League, which confirmed on Monday that they will resume fixtures this week. “With a national policing plan now in operation, the League and Clubs will continue to work with forces in respect of any challenges that may emerge regarding policing of specific fixtures,” the EFL said in a statement. “Consideration to individual circumstances will be made on a case-by-case basis, in line with standard match Safety Advisory Group (SAG) protocols.”
Pearson explains that for events like those surrounding the Queen’s funeral next week, the Met police will likely draw officers from other forces. That process, called mutual aid, means officers with experience of crowd management are likely to be in short supply for matches like Chelsea v Liverpool and Manchester United v Leeds, which were scheduled to take place this weekend.
“There is some flexibility, but it is logistically difficult and particularly when you’ve got mutual aid in play and you’ve got events knocking onto each other in terms of availability of police,” he says. “And we’ve got the situation at the moment that, following austerity, we still don’t have the number of police officers that we need in the country. And a lot of the officers that are coming in are highly inexperienced, so wouldn’t have the public order training that normally you’d want in a PSU at a high-risk fixture. This really is going to be a challenging weekend and it may be that there are some matches, particularly in the capital, that they simply think can’t go ahead.”
Clubs are desperate to get fixtures on this weekend, with the upcoming World Cup already providing added stress on a jam-packed schedule this season. But ultimately the final decision will lie with the local police force, not the club. It is therefore likely that, while the majority of fixtures will go ahead, especially in areas with bigger, better-equipped police forces, some could be postponed due to the Queen’s funeral.
“In reality they won’t be given any choice over the matter. It is the safety officer and the chief executive of the club who ultimately bear the responsibility for the safety of the spectators in the stadium, but the safety certificates require a certain level of policing,” Pearson adds.
“It’s a highly challenging situation. Cancelling fixtures this weekend is not going to be an easy answer going forward. But they will have a minimum number of riot-trained officers that they will want in London around the funeral. If mutual aid is needed to fulfil that, which it probably is, then some of those will need to come from other forces. And if that means football matches don’t go ahead, then that is what will happen.
“It has always been the case in policing, particularly around the royal family and these kinds of national events, they will take precedence over everything else.”
