Christian Heidel sees football in the pillory “completely wrongly”

Sports director Christian Heidel from Bundesliga club FSV Mainz 05 sees professional football in Germany as a scapegoat for the government’s inadequate corona policy. In the pandemic, football is “actually only a very small topic”, but is “always brought to the fore,” complained the 58-year-old in an interview with Frankfurter Rundschau: “Maybe we all made the mistake of expressing ourselves too late. The bad thing is that we got into a defensive stance that was nowhere near appropriate.”

Especially in the vaccination debate, Heidel sees football “completely unjustly pilloried”. Every other industry dreams of a vaccination quota of 95 percent in professional football, said the official: “I was extremely annoyed that football was used to distract attention from true omissions. That someone like Joshua Kimmich, because he was not vaccinated – what I don’t think it’s good either, to put it bluntly – being approached in such a public way completely missed the point. “

He was of the opinion that “something is going completely wrong. Because politicians in Germany have got used to only reacting and not acting at all,” explained Heidel. “The worst thing is populism: Always do what people want to hear. Everyone knew in the summer that something was coming. But because of the elections, it was simply swept under the table.”

He sees Germany this year as a “pioneer in Europe, as it shouldn’t be done,” said Heidel: “I would like a government that makes decisions that bring us to safety with foresight before the number of cases increases.”