There’s one bonus for Man United fans in the climate crisis

Fortunately for the rest of us, serious people continue to measure the advancing global crisis and to turn their informed minds in the direction of anticipating and, where possible, ameliorating its consequences. And those people include Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, who spoke this week about the “inevitability”, in the face of a slowly boiling world, of “re-engineering what the international [athletics] calendar looks like”.

He spoke in the wake of a World Championships in Tokyo which struggled through 90% humidity and temperatures above 30 degrees. Seventy percent of athletes now say climate change has impacted their training and competitions. “I’m not sure that we can go on asking some of our endurance-based athletes to be competing at times of the year which are really going to hit their performances and are probably putting them at risk as well,” Coe said.

It felt significant to be mulling these considerations in the week after monsoon conditions converted Manchester United v Chelsea into a grim farce only distantly related to football. Portions of that game seemed to be CGI, and the match was technically abandoned when Chelsea’s goalkeeper, Robert Sánchez, celebrated surviving for five minutes by getting sent off for charging into an advancing opponent somewhere in midfield. Not clever of him, but in fairness the rain at the time meant he couldn’t plausibly have been expected to see either the ball, or his opponent, or the edge of his own penalty area.

The match was then formally ­terminated as a contest when Enzo Maresca responded to this setback by withdrawing three-quarters of his front line and sending on a ­cavalry of defenders. Chelsea’s manager was accused afterwards of unseemly panic: it was only United, after all, and most sides would expect to manage pretty well against them these days, even after granting them superior numbers, a two-goal start and access to a specially trained swarm of killer bees. Again, though, in those particular circumstances, that seemingly barking decision could actually have been an entirely pragmatic rearrangement on Maresca’s part, based on confidential club data and meeting his entirely humane desire not to risk his team’s weaker swimmers.

Whatever, United duly waded to a 2-1 victory, and I’m sure Lord Coe would have been looking on ruefully at this climate-driven absurdity and shaking his head anew – and not just because he’s a Chelsea supporter, although that probably helped.

Just as we must recalibrate our sense of what constitutes a “summer Games”, it was apparent to anyone last week that football will soon be entirely impossible in Manchester in the rainy season, and may already be so. Supposedly future-proof designs for a new Old Trafford, revealed a few months back, showed the ground shrouded in what appeared to be a giant cagoule, which would obviously be sensible. But one fears the situation is already more dire and the club should probably now be joining Coe in thinking far more flexibly.

We know that certain northern Azerbaijani teams already move south for games when necessary to escape the extremities of their country’s winter. So United should start thinking about shifting these increasingly rain-threatened autumn fixtures closer to the south coast, where, for now, football still remains possible. It would be a wrench, of course, and logistically complex. But there are irresistible forces at work here. And one clear bonus from United’s point of view would be that their fans get to see them more easily.

Incidentally, Donald Trump drew gasps at the United Nations with his claim that “‘climate change is the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. Yet even his fiercest and most appalled critics would have to concede that here, for once, was a subject on which the president could speak from a position of authority and with the full weight of study and experience behind him. Con jobs, that is.

Photograph by Marc Atkins/Getty Images