FOOTBALL is supposed to be the people’s game.
It’s supposed to be about the fans as well as the players.
PANobody outside a chosen few inside Fifa headquarters in Zurich was celebrating the latest brainwave pulled off by world football boss Gianni Infantino[/caption]
GettyLionel Messi lifts the World Cup trophy in Qatar – a tournament allegedly powered by giant solar fields in the desert that NOBODY has ever seen[/caption]
And the World Cup, the pinnacle of the sport, is supposed to be a global party.
But nobody outside a chosen few inside Fifa headquarters in Zurich was celebrating the latest brainwave pulled off by world football boss Gianni Infantino.
A World Cup covering half the globe, spread over 39 days and involving 48 teams and 104 matches.
Starting with three games in South America, before the rest of the tournament is split between the Iberian peninsula and North Africa.
Yet what was inconceivable is now, overnight, a looming reality, coming our way in just seven years, in 2030.
A kick in the teeth for fans around the planet, who still love the beautiful game, no matter how ugly it can seem.
And further irrefutable proof that what counts in football now is not the sport, the emotion and the passion.
That went out of the window long ago.
The brutal truth is that it is now only about the money, the politics, the deals and the TV contracts.
Who in their right mind would conceive of sending fans halfway around the world — then back — for ONE match?
Fifa, of course.
The blazers in their ivory towers, who know they get executive travel, first-class seats and the biggest suites in the swankiest hotels, all meals and match tickets included, for nothing — plus £400 a day in cash for spending money just to keep them sweet.
No worries about saving up for the journey for these men and women.
The same Fifa that trumpeted the green credentials of a £185BILLION World Cup in Qatar, allegedly powered by giant solar fields in the desert that NOBODY has ever seen.
That’s before you even get into the other issues in the Gulf state — the treatment of migrant workers and legalised homophobia.
Yet it’s as much about the sheer cost of the concept as well.
Playing the opening three matches in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay pays homage to the centenary of the tournament that was first played in Uruguayan capital Montevideo in 1930.
Divide and rule
There is a romantic element in that — although many real fans of the game will argue that the 2030 tournament should have been hosted entirely back where it all began.
But Fifa is asking some fans to fork out thousands to fly 6,000-plus miles to see their team in action in South America and then back across the Atlantic for a tournament split between Morocco, Portugal and Spain.
Where, of course, tickets will be at premium rates for travelling fans. Someone has to pay the bills. And it’s you.
Does anybody in Zurich care about that? It doesn’t look that way, does it?
For Fifa President Infantino, football’s version of The Hood from Thunderbirds, it is an ingenious, some would argue brilliant, solution.
After all, he has handed six countries and three continents a piece of the action.
That allows all the potential bidders to keep face at home and also ensures the maximum interest and pay cheques from the European TV companies who fund his global projects, pitches and training centres in countries that otherwise would not be able to afford them.
Infantino may not have been a protege of former Fifa chief, disgraced Sepp Blatter.
But he has learned from the Blatter play book of divide and rule — and brought it into the modern age.
And seasoned, and cynical, Fifa watchers know what the real end game is here.
It is less about 2030 — although that is what has captured immediate attention.
Instead, it is more, far more, about 2034 — and giving Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman what HE has craved for years.
The door for the Saudis to walk through and host that tournament is not ajar. It is wide open.
Nominally, Australia could bid as well.
But it would be a forlorn and expensive waste of money. The die is cast.
“All the fish is sold,” as they say in Fifa land.
It does not matter that there will be another desert storm of protest, that fans will not be able to get a drink — to be fair, the absence of booze in the stadiums in Qatar made for a far less aggressive and hostile atmosphere.
Nor that the Saudi record on human rights is pretty compatible with that in Qatar.
Indeed, the Qataris do not, as far as we know, have a track record of dismembering critical journalists in any of their embassies.
Doha 1, Riyadh 0.
Effectively gifting Saudi the tournament means another winter World Cup in November and December of 2034 — and another enforced six-week break for the Premier League.
And because the new 32-team Club World Cup — Chelsea, Manchester City and almost certainly Liverpool play in the first version in the USA in 2025 — is held in the same country as the next World Cup, the situation will be similar 12 months earlier, with players going to Saudi in 2033.
Scant consolation
Two successive European club seasons ruptured in half, just to ensure MBS gets what he wants.
Have the fans, players or even the clubs been asked about that? Of course they haven’t. They never are.
The good news, the only good news, is that Infantino will not be around to bask in the reflected “glory” of his masterplan when it comes to fruition.
Even after dismissing his first three years in the job as not counting, he must give up his place as Fifa President in 2031.
Canada’s Victor Montagliani is a potential successor.
But that will be scant consolation to the fans forking out money they really can’t afford to follow their teams in 2030 or four years later.
They are barely an afterthought.
Scenery for the TV pictures.
Willing victims who pay for the privilege.
As Sir Alex Ferguson once said, in very different circumstances: “Football. Bloody hell.”
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