The coronavirus pandemic is set to change football for generations to come It is pointless blaming football, no plan can guard against the world's end

                                                                                                  The coronavirus crisis will change football, however temporary this abeyance may seem. It will change the market, it will change the numbers, it will change what constitutes financial stability.
Nobody who lives through this crisis will ever feel wholly secure in their world again and just as the economics of the West will take decades to recover, so football's ring of confidence is gone. From Newcastle to the Nou Camp, the game faces adjustment. This time, there is no alternative. It is pointless blaming football for the hardship that has befallen the sport in recent weeks. Pointless wondering why it did not possess the mechanism to resist a crisis that has laid waste to entire industries. 

One might as well berate successful restaurateurs for not having contingency for there being no more customers, overnight. Football was flying and then, in an instant, was grounded.

Full houses to no houses. Airlines collapsed without passengers, so it is hardly surprising football dies without a game to watch, and crowds. Television money dries up, sponsors withhold.

We can argue clubs were living beyond their means, but there is no business plan that successfully guards against the world's end. One might as well have asked a Hiroshima cafe owner in 1945 for his fiscal strategy if an atomic bomb fell on the city.

Coronavirus has been compared to war. It isn't in the least like war. There are many political and economic theorists willing to argue that capitalism needs conflict, that it benefits from the strife of nations.

It was President Eisenhower who referred to the 'military-industrial complex' in his farewell address to the nation in 1961.

There is no coronavirus-industrial complex. Coronavirus is a destroyer — of wealth, of dreams, of the future.

Just as no individual is going to feel comfortable in a crowd, no club will feel confident risking the budget and no sponsor or investor is going to have money to burn on an ambitious strategy.

We will enter an age of conservatism from here and, it might be argued, not before time.

The transfer market will look very different. We may imagine a summer in which clubs still table £150million bids for Jadon Sancho, but who could take such a gamble in the post-coronavirus climate? Barcelona, one of the richest clubs in the world, have been reduced to arguing with their players over a 70 per cent or 50 per cent wage cut. This is not just a catastrophe that is affecting the smallest and weakest.

Germany's four Champions League clubs — Bayern Munich, RB Leipzig, Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen — have nobly donated £20m to help those further down the pyramid.

This could include rivals in the Bundesliga, though, not just those at the very bottom. This is not a crisis that is only troubling the financial basket cases; model clubs, admired clubs, could also go under. Atletico Madrid, the epitome of a successful elite enterprise, selling high and buying low, has been taking drastic measures.

So we understand. Reading the accounts of very decent owners who have been selfless custodians of their clubs, but now face ruin, nobody should judge.

This is a tragedy that was barely imaginable 12 months ago. Nor is it the belated justification for Financial Fair Play, because a global pandemic was never the motivation and its adherents and its opponents are all struggling.Yet if, nine months on, coronavirus is back and wreaking havoc once more, and your club has squandered its budget on another round of fruitless transfer spending — there will be a reckoning. It does not compute that £100m can be spent on players, or £20m on agents' fees, by a club that has lived through coronavirus and knows the cost.