The stands will be silent. It’s not for lack of interest, though let’s be honest, the Nations League usually feels like a glorified spreadsheet exercise. This time, the silence is mandatory. UEFA, the governing body that treats bureaucracy like a high-art form, has locked the doors. No fans. No chants. No overpriced lukewarm pies. Just twenty-two players and the echoes of their own shouting.

England fans aren't staying home because they’ve finally tired of the heartbreak. They’re staying home because Croatia is serving a sentence. Specifically, a "behind closed doors" punishment triggered by a swastika marked onto the pitch during a previous match against Italy. It’s a blunt-force penalty for a recurring problem, and as usual, the collateral damage includes everyone who actually wanted to see the game.

This is the friction of modern sport. We’re told we live in an era of hyper-accessibility. You can stream a match from a fishing boat in the middle of the North Sea. You can track a player’s heat map in real-time. But if you want to actually sit in a plastic chair in Rijeka and watch the Three Lions navigate a mid-week tactical slog, the system says no. The gates are barred by a disciplinary committee that moves with the grace of a dial-up modem.

Think about the fans who didn't get the memo in time. There’s always a subset of supporters who book their travel the second the fixtures drop. They hunt for the €150 budget flights and the non-refundable Airbnb rentals with "charming" views of a parking lot. They do the math, they commit the capital, and then the ruling drops. Suddenly, that non-refundable €500 weekend in Croatia is just a very expensive trip to watch a game on a laptop in a hotel room three miles from the stadium. It’s a glitch in the fan experience that no one bothers to patch.

The optics are miserable. A stadium with 8,000 empty seats is a visual reminder that for all the talk about "the 12th man," the fans are ultimately just data points on a balance sheet. When the data gets messy, the administrators simply delete the entry. UEFA gets to look tough on racism, the Croatian federation gets a slap on the wrist, and the England fans get to watch from their sofas while wondering why they bothered renewing their supporters' club membership.

It’s a peculiar kind of technological irony. We have the tech to identify every individual in a crowd of fifty thousand. We have facial recognition, digital ticketing, and enough surveillance to make a casino boss weep with envy. Yet, the governing bodies still rely on the collective punishment model of a 19th-century boarding school. Can’t find the specific culprit? Lock everyone out. It’s lazy. It’s a low-res solution to a high-definition problem.

The players hate it too. Ask any pro about "ghost games." They’ll tell you it feels like a training session with higher stakes and weirder vibes. You can hear the ball hitting the boot. You can hear the coaches swearing in three different languages. The "product"—which is what broadcasters call the game when they think we aren't listening—loses its texture. It becomes a flat, two-dimensional broadcast of a match that feels like it isn't really happening.

We’re moving toward a version of sports where the physical presence of a human being is optional. If the TV money is cleared and the sponsorship logos are visible on the digital overlays, does the physical crowd even matter to the bottom line? Probably not. The gate receipts for a match in a small stadium in Rijeka are rounding errors for organizations of this size. The fans are the atmosphere, sure, but atmosphere is hard to quantify in a quarterly report.

So, the England fans will stay home. They’ll grumble on X, they’ll ask for refunds that will never materialize, and they’ll wait for the next away day. They are the bugs in a system that is increasingly designed to run without them.

If a game kicks off in an empty stadium and there’s no one there to boo the referee, does the result even count?