March Madness Without the Madness: Drumbeat Grows to Ban Fans

(Bloomberg) -- The squeak of sneakers on hardwood. The blow of a referee’s whistle. A coach barking instructions to players.

But otherwise, silence.

That’s the fate awaiting more sporting events in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak. Contagion fears and mounting restrictions are forcing everyone from the NCAA to the International Olympic Committee to consider the once unthinkable: holding sporting events without fans.

Spectator-free sporting events have been increasingly common overseas, with Italy, Switzerland and Japan all holding them as they seek to contain coronavirus. Now the concept is coming to North America at an especially bad time: The NCAA’s Division I basketball tournament -- better known as March Madness -- gets underway in a little over a week, the Major League Baseball’s season is just around the corner, and playoffs for the NBA and NHL start next month.

“They’ve got to be chatting about it and thinking about what they do,” Richard Peddie, the former chief executive officer of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, said on the Bloomberg Business of Sports podcast this week. “That talk is going to happen at a very high level.”

Most big sporting events in the U.S. are still going ahead as planned for now. The NCAA reaffirmed Friday that games shouldn’t be canceled, and Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia said this week the Masters are on. NBA also sent a memo saying that it’s the league -- not teams -- that makes decisions such as canceling games or altering formats, including having a match without admitting fans.

But some smaller events are already banning spectators, with college sports leading the way. Some of the games of the NCAA Division III men’s basketball tournament -- a lower-tier version of March Madness -- will be held with no fans in attendance.

Public-health officials also barred spectators from events at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s annual athletic competition this weekend in Columbus, Ohio. That’s despite the fact that there were no known confirmed virus cases in the state.

The collegiate March Madness tournament, starting mid-March, includes stops in the states of Washington, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak; California, which has declared a state of emergency; and New York, where more than 22 cases have been confirmed. NCAA officials are pondering options for the Division I tournament.

“If you can think of it, it’s something that we’ve gone through an analysis around,” NCAA Chief Operating Officer Donald Remy said in an interview this week. “We’ve contingency-planned for all circumstances.”

For a sense of what will likely happen in the U.S., take a look at Europe, where the outbreak escalated at the end of February. In Italy, the epicenter in the region, major soccer teams are playing in empty stadiums. Numerous sports events have been postponed or canceled, including the Rome and Paris marathons, cycling races and skiing events. And while top-tier soccer games are on, the Premier League and the English Football League have banned prematch fair-play handshakes to help prevent contagion.

The NCAA basketball tournament will span 14 U.S. cities over three weeks, making it especially challenging. An advocacy group for college athletes recently suggested holding the games without an audience present. But for an event whose very name stems in part from the zealotry of fans, the idea of leaving them out has been hard to accept. It also accounts for more than 80% of the NCAA’s annual revenue.

SARS Memories

The number of coronavirus cases has topped 100,000 worldwide, including 3,400 deaths, mostly in China, where it originated.

In the U.S., the number of cases has increased rapidly this past week as more people got tested. Most experience only mild symptoms, but the novel virus can be deadly for the elderly and those with underlying conditions -- and it has no treatment nor vaccine. The Seattle area has been hardest hit, accounting for most of the dozen deaths as the outbreak centered around a long-term care facility there.

An employee who works at CenturyLink Field, the 68,000-seat stadium where the Seattle Seahawks football team plays, recently tested positive for coronavirus, officials said on Thursday. Still, the local Major League Soccer team, the Seattle Sounders FC, is planning to hold a game Saturday with fans.

Peddie, who oversaw hockey’s Toronto Maple Leafs team, knows what it’s like to host events while a virus is looming.

During the SARS outbreak in 2003, the Leafs were in a playoff contest with the Philadelphia Flyers in Toronto. Hundreds of people in Canada contracted the illness, a version of coronavirus, and more than 40 people died.

“It was pretty horrific,” Peddie said.

Yet the team continued to play games in the city -- with fans.

“I was pretty anxious,” he said. “We had 19,000 people in the building -- they’re all about 20 inches apart. I thought the fear was very much there. But I don’t remember doing anything other than having a lot of angst.”

For now, most pro leagues in North America are taking the same approach. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t recommended canceling games or banning fans, and teams are following that advice.

Nick Sakiewicz, the commissioner of the National Lacrosse League, said the organization is “not contemplating” the idea of eliminating spectators. But it’s advising teams about health protocols based on information it’s getting from the CDC, he said.

“According to the CDC, we are being told the risk is very low in the U.S.,” he said. “We are monitoring it very closely.”

Orioles Precedent

It’s not unprecedented to hold large-scale sporting events without fans in the U.S. The Baltimore Orioles played a 2015 game in an empty ballpark after unrest swept the city stemming from the death of a man in police custody.

If events are canceled altogether, a big question is whether insurance will cover the bill.

NCAA executives said earlier this week that they had an insurance policy that they believe would cover some losses from a diminished tournament. Olympics broadcaster NBC, meanwhile, said it would suffer no losses if the Summer Games were canceled in Tokyo.

Coverage will depend on the specifics of each contract, said Heidi Lawson, an insurance lawyer and partner at Cooley LLP who has worked with the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee on its insurance plans. Event cancellation policies may or may not cover a pandemic, depending on how they’re written.

If the CDC or another government entity forces sporting events to ban fans, that will be an easy decision for teams and leagues to make, Peddie said. The tricky thing is if they don’t.

“If the government says, ‘Close down,’ you close down,” he said. “It’s that gray area in between. They almost can’t win on that.”

--With assistance from Cécile Daurat and David Welch.

To contact the reporters on this story: Nick Turner in Los Angeles at nturner7@bloomberg.net;Scott Soshnick in New York at ssoshnick@bloomberg.net;Eben Novy-Williams in New York at enovywilliam@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, Cécile Daurat

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