Coronavirus: 86 soccer players in the 1st and 2nd Bundesliga are still unvaccinated

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Christian Seifert: "Please get vaccinated!"

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Frank Rumpenhorst / dpa

86 of the more than 1,000 contract players from the Bundesliga and the 2nd Bundesliga have not yet been vaccinated, according to DFL boss Christian Seifert.

The managing director of the German Football League named this number in an interview with the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" (Saturday) and said: "That is the status from mid-November."

In view of this quota, Seifert considers the most recent public discussion about mandatory vaccination for footballers to be populist.

With a view to the "sometimes more than 70,000 new infections every day, I am already wondering whether there aren't more pressing problems in the country than 86 unvaccinated footballers," he said.

"In Germany I occasionally had the impression that the prime ministerial conferences often dealt with the headlines for the subsequent press conferences," said Seifert.

"Here and there you can't get rid of the feeling that professional football is also used by individuals to get into the media or to distract attention from other things."

The Prime Ministers Markus Söder (Bavaria / CSU) and Hendrik Wüst (North Rhine-Westphalia / CDU) had brought a vaccination requirement for Bundesliga professionals into play.

However, Seifert, who left the league at the end of the year, strongly promoted vaccinations.

The 52-year-old said he "has absolutely no understanding if someone does not get vaccinated".

For professional footballers, too, "what I believe applies to all citizens: get vaccinated, please!"

Football clubs are also affected by the increasing number of infections.

For example, Bayern Munich currently has to do without the unvaccinated national player Joshua Kimmich, who had tested positive for the corona virus.

RB Leipzig also has some prominent failures, in the 2nd division the game between SC Sandhausen at FC St. Pauli was canceled at the beginning of November after the guests reported a corona outbreak.

sak / sid / dpa