Club World Cup didn't start the fire – it didn't light it but we'll try to fight it
Does it feel too much? Premier League bleeding into the playoffs into the Champions League into the international break … we're still bleeding … rip off your shirt and make a tourniquet! The European Under-21 and Under‑19 Championships into the Club World Cup, overlapping with the Women's Euros … oh look the Premier League fixtures for 2025-26 are out and the EFL ones come out next week … and there's David Prutton paying (excellent) homage to David Mitchell's pisstake of Sky Sports on Sky Sports: 'Catch all of the constantly happening football here it's all here and it's all football. Always. It's impossible to keep track of all the football.'
You start to imagine Billy Joel rewriting We Didn't Start the Fire … an endless list of footballers and pundits, of owners and streaming services, of controversies and grimness amid the beauty and joy. Will it ever reach breaking point?
To legacy fans (who liked football before the start of June) the Club World Cup may feel like the moment where you switched off, or just didn't switch on in the first place. If football began yesterday, you'd probably plan it with a tournament with club sides from all over the globe. But football didn't begin yesterday. Jonathan Wilson can tell you exactly when that was. And of course you don't have to watch this shoehorned land‑grab of a tournament, but sometimes it would be nice to not even have the option.
The inflated prize money, where that wealth has come from and the impact huge sums of money going to individual clubs will have on leagues around the world are the start of the problems. Then there's the fear of the US's Immigration and Customs Enforcement service coming to deport a couple of players (or some of those coming to watch). The crowds are, to quote Gennaro Gattuso, 'sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit' – more than 400,000 empty seats so far (BBC), 1.5m tickets sold so far for the tournament (Fifa). The tournament overlapping with the Women's Euros is disgraceful.
Careers may be shorter, and we should care about this issue – but how many of us will just support the next guy in the shirt? The reality will be the same whenever players with the potential to reach the peak of the game suffer injury or loss of form. Take Dele Alli or Ansu Fati: we just stop calling them elite and then let them drift from our minds. There will always be top players playing for top clubs. There will always be the best player and so on and so on. Unless players strike it will carry on down the same path.
It is obviously easier for neutrals to ignore it. But if you happen to be, say, a Chelsea fan, then part of deal is that you follow your team in their games. Sure there's a hierarchy of importance – Premier League over Carabao Cup – but it doesn't feel like you can just keep this file closed. It might the most obvious thing ever written, but if your team is playing, your team is playing.
To criticise the Club World Cup is to be accused of having a Euro- or Anglo-centric view of the game – and that might be fair. 'Try telling those Botafogo fans that this doesn't matter.' The scenes at full time after their win over PSG were wonderful. Who wouldn't want to see Lionel Messi score another great free-kick? Do you know what, I'm probably OK.
Fifa, the guardian of the game, is plonking this in with little care for elite player welfare or the fans or the women's game. It is not alone. Uefa enlarged the Champions League; the prize money there already distorts smaller European leagues. The Premier League won't filter enough money down to the EFL. League Two clubs won't vote for more teams to come up from the National League. The Club World Cup is just the ultimate example. The notion of the football family is a nice one to cling to. But it only really exists when you can tweet that you care about something that has no material impact on your prospects.
This tournament will grow as its history grows. There will always be people who want to watch football because, well, football is great. The danger as always is what comes next: franchise football teams, franchise footballers, a world league, the end of the pyramid. You can't blame people for just wanting to watch a game without thinking of the greater good, or bad. This is the football you are given, you can watch it if you like.
Those of us lucky enough to work in the game should constantly recognise the privilege, and even when I'm complaining about the amount of football, I'm watching Cambridge United's shirt-reveal video over and over (not because I'm in it, but because Paul Wanless is at the chippy! Steve Fallon is in the Cambridge Blue!) and I'm checking the Spurs transfer gossip. The game has that hold over us, and it is a shame that there are too many people right at the top who want to exploit that.
Surely a month off would be good for everyone? Just four or five weeks without VAR, instead the soothing voice of Marais Erasmus rocking and rolling it – that's hit him outside the line, surely?
In the meantime … come on Billy … get out your piano … overwhelm us with just the sheer amount of all this stuff …
Lionel Messi, Ben Mee, Gianni's shiny trophy key
Player welfare, PSR, Tuesday's Stoke away
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We didn't start the fire …
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