Europe's top football leagues to revise COVID-19 protocols after fixture chaos

Serie A and the English Premier League are in the process of updating and clarifying their COVID-19 protocols after a string of game postponements has caused a back-log of fixtures and confusion around what qualifies for a rescheduled match.

On Wednesday, the Italian government approved a new sports protocol outlining clearer guidelines on when a match should be postponed for COVID-19 related reasons.

Sport, health, and government bodies have agreed that fixtures must be fulfilled unless 35 per cent or more of the players in a squad have tested positive to the virus.

Positive-testing players must self-isolate, and while their close contacts do not have to, they must be continually tested for five days, wear an FFP2 mask off the pitch, and record a negative test result four hours before a match.

The hope is that new measures around postponements should stop further fixture confusion after a chaotic start to the year.

Four games in Serie A were farcically abandoned on January 7 when only one team showed up for each of them due to conflicting instructions from sport and health authorities.

The league body stuck to the original protocol by refusing to postpone games where teams had at least 13 players, including a goalkeeper, available.

But four teams — Bologna, Torino, Salernitana and Udinese — were forbidden from travelling by their local health authorities (ASL) due to COVID-19 outbreaks.

That meant their respective opponents Inter Milan, Atalanta, Venezia and Fiorentina turned up at the stadium, named a team and waited until half time for the match to be officially abandoned.

England's Premier League is expected to follow suit and clarify its guidelines after 22 matches have been postponed in the past five weeks.

The new rules are