Soccer’s response to coronavirus has proved two things. One is quite how fractured the game’s structure has become, how unable it is to speak with one voice, even on an issue as pressing as its role in mitigating a public health emergency. Each authority has been unable to look beyond its own responsibility, to imagine itself as part of a greater whole.

That has always been the case, of course; it is what lies at the heart of the ongoing conversations about the global calendar, the endless struggle to fold the ambitions and the greed of Europe’s aristocratic clubs into some broader structure.

But it has been laid bare in the last few weeks just how rife the game is with self-interest, how little care there is for the sport as a whole, and how vulnerable that makes everything.

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The crisis has revealed how reluctant organizing bodies are to inconvenience themselves and how navel-gazing club officials can be, wondering whether their players will be overloaded by makeup games when there is a possibility the season itself might have to be canceled.

The second is not unrelated. Nobody doubts that soccer — as a sport — is by its very nature a nonessential activity. It does not matter, not like guaranteeing that children have access to education or that an economy can continue functioning or that people have enough to eat. It is in the front rank of things that should be considered optional, easily sacrificed for the greater good.

But that is not how soccer the business sees it. Action would certainly have been taken sooner if there were not quite so much money riding on the sport. Every available solution would seem much more feasible if there were not quite so many financial — and legal — factors to be considered.