Craving the adrenaline of a live soccer game?

Well, Belarus, Burundi, Nicaragua and Tajikistan have you covered — despite the fact that it may put players at risk.

The unlikely quartet appear to be the only countries that have continued to permit soccer leagues to compete, even as much of the world has entered coronavirus-induced lockdowns.

Nicaragua’s 10-team soccer league, Primera Liga de Nicaragua, is seeing a surge in viewers worldwide, according to the Reuters news agency. Games are played in empty stadiums and broadcast locally and online.

“We can tell from monitoring these things that more people are paying attention, particularly on betting sites,” the secretary general of the Nicaraguan Football Federation, Jose Maria Bermudez, told Reuters. “It has no effect on us financially — people win or lose money, we don’t get more money — but we can see that people are following us because we are one of the few countries where football is still going on.”

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[Source: Washington Post]