The Premier Soccer League, the Siya crew has established, has taken another shot at attempting to speed up the return of fans to the stadium.
In about a week or so, it will mark two years since football venues for professional matches in South Africa were allowed to have a maximum capacity of spectators – the Coronavirus pandemic struck in March 2020 and led to a hard lockdown.
Since then, the only time fans have been to elite matches are during Bafana Bafana matches for the World Cup qualifiers as well as the MTN8 final between Cape Town City and Mamelodi Sundowns some time last year.
But those events were limited to up to 2000 people inside the stadium.
According to a highly placed source, Soccer Laduma has been led to believe the PSL has submitted a proposal to government arguing for a 50 percent capacity of the return of spectators, hopefully before the end of the current season.
This, insiders said, has been in the pipeline for some time now, although it has hardly picked up momentum because of the Covid-19 waves.
However, with cases currently low, SA enjoying a hybrid of natural immunity and vaccinations, it is expected that the State of Disaster will be scrapped soon along with a lot of the regulations put in place to curb the virus two years ago!
Local football fans appear to be losing interest in the game because of no access to the stadiums and thousands of them marched to the Orlando Stadium last weekend during the Soweto Derby between Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs demanding they be allowed back.
It remains to be seen how quickly government will move to action this request for 50 percent capacity at football matches given that this ideas has been mooted for a while now without any real plan of actions…
