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Bring Back The Fans: Wembley safe at half capacity says company central to stadiums and venues reopening
Wembley Stadium could safely re-open for tonight’s England match at 50 per cent capacity, according to analysis by a company central to stadiums and venues reopening across Europe.
On a night when Gareth Southgate’s side will host Denmark without fans again, a crowd management study by ONHYS claimed that as many as 38,000 spectators could be allowed in safely.
Adding support to the Standard’s Bring Back The Fans campaign, Sebastien Paris, founder and chief executive of ONHYS, said of the return of fans: “I’m confident that it would be possible, not only for Wembley, but for normal life.”
Paris added: “We don’t say the R rate would be perfect. The best decision you can take is to re-open if the R rate [inside stadiums] is lower than the R rate you have in that country, otherwise the conclusion would be to just keep people at home. But if they are safer in an event than in the street, I think it would be rational to re-open.”
As well as working on stadiums and other public events in France and the rest of Europe re-opening, ONHYS have also been in partnership with Olympic chiefs over crowd management for the 2024 Games. Comparing France to Wembley, he said: “We applied it in France and other countries. In various cases, it was events like Wembley, sports events but also public operations. It would be reasonable to have dedicated studies for each event and conclude on a case-by-case basis and re-open.”
The Government performed a U-turn over its October 1 return date for spectators to sports events, despite arguments from various sports that spectators could safely be welcomed back in with reduced numbers.
And Paris said that the Government and other decision-makers around stadiums should increasingly look at the wider evidence.
“Technology is a means to achieve something,” he said. “It’s not a miracle solution. We have new technology that could change the way we take decisions but, at the end, the deciders need to make the decisions. But taking a decision with good metrics is better than taking with just overall statistics.
“I think it’s time to take better decisions that are more grounded on scientific analysis and more contextual to the situation.”
ONHYS’s analysis claims that re-opening Wembley at full capacity and with no additional measures would generate an R rate of about 2, well above the national transmission rate and generating 1,500 new infections on the night.
𝘽𝙍𝙄𝙉𝙂 𝘽𝘼𝘾𝙆 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙁𝘼𝙉𝙎
The Evening Standard today launches a campaign to get supporters back into stadiums.
Communities are suffering, small businesses are struggling and lower-league clubs need a lifeline.
Backed by @IanWright0, we say: #BringBackTheFans. pic.twitter.com/LSrwTSXD2F— standardsport (@standardsport)
But by halving the capacity and introducing measures to control the flow of people in and outside the ground, as well as the enforced use of face coverings, it claims that rate could be slashed to just 0.11 while the R-rate in the general population is around 1.2. The study focuses only on the entrances of the stadium, so will not give the full picture of the transmission risk.
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