Atletico Madrid have sold fewer than 200 tickets for Wednesday’s Champions League game against Liverpool amid coronavirus concerns after the previous Anfield meeting between the sides was blamed for a huge spike in cases.
The match comes 20 months after 3,000 fans of the Spanish club converged on Merseyside for a round-of-16, second-leg tie despite Madrid being at centre of a Covid-19 outbreak and La Liga, at that point, staging games behind closed doors.
The game on March 11, 2020, was the last match to take place in front of a crowd in England before football shut down because of the pandemic, with the findings of a parliamentary report indicating that there were 37 additional deaths in local hospitals after the game.
An investigation by MPs into the government’s handling of the crisis said the decision not to go into a national lockdown sooner, before the match attended by 52,267 fans, was one of the worst public health failures in UK history.
“Events that may have spread the virus proceeded — such as the football match between Liverpool FC and Atletico Madrid on 11 March — the day the coronavirus was categorised as a pandemic by the WHO — with a reported crowd of over 50,000 and the Cheltenham Festival of racing between March 10 and 13, attracting more than 250,000 people,” a section of the report read.
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“Subsequent analysis suggested that there were an additional 37 and 41 deaths respectively at local hospitals after these events. However, it is not clear whether those deaths were as a result of attendance at the events themselves or associated activities such as travel or congregation in pubs.”
It is understood that testing requirements for travelling into the UK and concerns over new cases of the Delta Plus variant have dissuaded Atletico fans from taking up their full 3,000 allocation on this occasion. As of today, about 170 tickets had been sold.
Liverpool beat Diego Simeone’s side 3-2 in Madrid a fortnight ago and will progress into the knockout stage of the competition with two games to spare with a similar result.
Jürgen Klopp is hoping to have the influential midfielder Fabinho back after an absence of three matches due to a knee complaint, while Thiago Alcântara could be named in the squad having recovered from a calf injury that has sidelined him since mid-September.
Liverpool v Atletico Madrid
Wednesday, 8pm kick-off
TV: BT Sport 2. Radio: BBC Five Live.
