3 days ago
Infantino's Club World Cup: An unwanted, bloated, bizarre tournament that is somehow too big to fail
ROLL UP, ROLL up, and welcome to the Gianni Infantational.
Fifa's newly-expanded Club World Cup kicks off in the United States this week, where the stars include Paris Saint-Germain, Lionel Messi and, chiefly, the Fifa president.
No man has been so closely associated with a sporting competition since Michael Murphy was both frequent winner and title sponsor of the Donegal senior football championship.
The competition's gaudy trophy – which resembles a golden plate but is unlocked by a key to morph into what looks like a 3D rendering of the atom – bears Infantino's name on it in two different locations, while among the rare collectible sticker for the tournament's official Panini album is, yes, Gianni Infantino. (Infantino, in fairness, has previously shown his adhesive qualities in any room also containing an authoritarian world leader.)
You may be moved to ask whether this tournament exists for anything beyond the fulfilment of Infantino's monstrous ego and, truly, this column is struggling to give you an alternate reason beyond football's propulsive greed. If there is enough money out there for something to exist, then it simply must exist.
Never mind the fact that football supporters were hardly clamouring for it, and the elite, Europe-based players who will compete to win it are already exhausted and threatening strike action over the bloating of their calendar.
Fifa will say its a means of spreading the wealth to clubs outside of Europe, which is a noble idea indeed. The problem is that if you want to spread that wealth, this is a terrible way to do it.
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A handful of European clubs will earn enough to further pull up the drawbridge on their national and continental rivals, while the smaller teams will be given prize money many multiples of that which they earn on a normal basis, which risks ruining the competitive balance of leagues across the world.
As a competition, it does not pass the casual viewer's smell test. For one, this is a competition to crown the best club in the world that's missing all of the champions of England, Spain, and Italy. There's a limit of two clubs per country, and Chelsea qualified by virtue of winning the Champions League in 2021, which was done by a completely different set of players playing under a different coach who was employed by a different owner.
The qualifying format has betrayed the extent to which European football has been dominated by its top quartet of leagues, as the highest-ranked side falling outside these leagues and thus competing in America are Red Bull Salzburg, who this year ranked as the third-best side in Austria.
Elsewhere, Inter Miami have qualified seemingly because they have Messi, who is famous. The reigning MLS champions are LA Galaxy, but they are not competing this month. No, Inter Miami have a place instead, as they won the 'supporters shield', a trinket given to the side that tops the regular-season table prior to the play-offs. This is like giving the title to the Premier League team that scored the most goals.
Gianni rocked up to this presentation, and triumphantly announced, Noel's Christmas Presents-style, that Inter Miami had earned an extra special bonus surprise: they would be competing at the forthcoming Club World Cup. Messi's presence hasn't exactly moved the dial: ticket prices for the opening game in which he will feature have been slashed. (The Athletic report that students are being offered five tickets for a total of $20, with tickets initially reaching $349 in January.)
Gianni has continued to boost his glitzy Infantational without doing any traditional press conferences, or facing questions from any journalist or organisation who might ask an awkward question. He has appeared on iShowSpeed's YouTube channel, which wasn't exactly a Gen Z Frost/Nixon.. Instead he unveiled the official match ball and claimed Cristiano Ronaldo would be transferred from Al-Nassr to a competing side, in order to play at the tournament.
This didn't happen in the end – though PIF-owned Al Hilal are in talks with PIF-owned Al-Ittihad to get N'Golo Kante on loan for the tournament – but went to accentuate the sheer lack of seriousness that now afflicts the very top of Fifa.
Whereas the Champions League expanded to meet broadcasters' demand, there was little broadcaster demand for the Club World Cup: the BBC didn't show an interest in it while ITV bid a competitive £0 to show it. But riding to the rescue came DAZN, who bought the rights for a reported billion pounds, and have agreed to show it for free. If you're wondering where the loss-making DAZN found so much money to bid on an unproven tournament featuring heavyweight games like Monterrey vs Urawa Red Diamonds and Wydad AC vs Al Ain, then do not worry. A few weeks later, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund took a 10% stake in DAZN worth a reported. . . billion dollars. Phew, what a coincidence!
PIF meanwhile came onboard as event sponsors six days ago, a day after Qatar Airways signed up. If you think it is unusual for a major, wealthy sponsor to become involved so close to the event and miss out on the lucrative months in advance of the tournament, then you'd be right.
The whole event underscores the reality that football is no longer enraptured with capitalism in any traditional sense. The sport is at the moment all supply and no demand: Fifa and its broadcasters and sponsors had the wealth to make this happen, in spite of the fact that hardly anyone was demanding it.
One nation it does suit is, of course, Saudi Arabia. Elite players are chiefly dissuaded from joining the Saudi Pro League because it is not the top end of the sport, as they would be waving goodbye to the Champions League. But if the Club World Cup becomes sufficiently big, and if it can happen more often than once every four years – two-year intervals are already being mooted – then the Saudis can make the Champions League come to them.
And Europe's elite clubs, already carrying massive debts and feeling hemmed in by domestic financial fair play rules, will hungrily follow the money dangled in front of them.
So despite the fact that the players are wrecked and unenthused, and that the qualifying format makes no sense, the ticket sales are slow and many major broadcasters see no value in it, the Club World Cup is too big to fail.
Professional football is eating itself and so this bizarre, unwanted tournament will go down in history as another staging post at which we could see the world's most popular sport retreat further into the clutches of an absurdly wealthy few.
And it has been made possible by sport's great handmaiden to oligarchy and private capital, Gianni Infantino. What a legacy.
