Guidelines for the limited return of football training
The impact of COVID-19 has resulted in the suspension of all football activities since early March. Since this time, the priority of Football NSW has been to safeguard the health and wellbeing of the community and to undertake its social responsibility to do everything it can to slow down the spread of COVID-19.
Read MWFA guidelines for resumption of play (as at 22 June 2020).
COVID-19 is mostly likely spread through direct close contact with a person while they are infectious (usually face to face contact for at least 15 minutes; or being in the same closed space for at least 2 hours). Given that football is played outdoors, the risk of infection through playing sport is minimal, and now with the rate of infection greatly reduced, it is time to cautiously reintroduce football related activity in a staged approach.
The conditions are in line with government directions as at the date stated above.
These guidelines provide for the limited return of football training. Training for groups greater than 10 people and playing matches is still not permitted under public health guidelines and is not sanctioned by Football NSW. In starting training, we need to satisfy participants, volunteers and their families that it is safe to do so, and to ensure that venue operators (typically local councils) and others are satisfied that your club is taking reasonable steps to keep people safe.
We want to give you a clear set of steps that will allow clubs to ensure that they meet the requirements to:
- Have gatherings of no more than 10 people at any time,
- Have appropriate social distancing of at least 1.5m between people at all times,
- Allow for at least 4m2 for all participants at all times, and;
- Maintain reasonable levels of hygiene to minimise the risk of infection.
These are guidelines, not regulations. Download the guidelines here.
Our duty of care to our participants is to take all reasonable care to keep them safe.
Clubs need to be able to demonstrate that they have done so and our guidelines and complementary resources are designed to help them with that process.
To further aid the fight against COVID-19, Football NSW supports the Australian Government’s COVIDSafe app and strongly encourages all members of the football community to get behind this initiative.