November 18 – Sometimes you come across a person who appears to have become bigger than the organisation or institution they represent. FIFA seems to have found one – and it isn’t Lionel Messi.
FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, has taken a step towards football immortality, but not via perfomance on the field of play. He has had his name engraved on the Club World Cup trophy.
The Club World Cup is Infantino’s increasingly desperate looking expanded club competition that will be played with 32 teams in the US in 2025.
Currently it is a competition struggling to find anyone to pay for it as broadcasters and sponsors, with just seven months to go, have been slow to come to the party that Infantino is promising but which the football world seems to have adopted an attitude on a scale sliding between ambivalence and ‘not over my dead body’.
World players’ union Fifpro and the World Leagues Association have demanded that the 2025 competition is suspended with immediate effect.
The inscription on shiny new 24 carat gold trophy launched to the world’s media last week reads: “The golden era of club football: the era of the Club World Cup. The pinnacle of all club competition. Inspired by FIFA President Gianni Infantino, the competition, first staged in 2025, eclipses any precedent.”
It is a remarkable display of self-importance and reinvention of history for a competition that was the brainchild of Infantino but of former president Sepp Blatter and Japanese ad agency Dentsu (their names are not inscribed on the trophy but in the interests of fairness and accuracy perhaps should be). The Club World Cup was first launched as the Toyota Cup in Japan. It ended badly for both Blatter and Dentsu and the ‘ownership’ of the competition was the cause for dispute for many years subsequently.
Infantino has frequently taken to the public stage to say that his version of the 32-team Club World Cup every four years – FIFA is keeping a version of the old 7-team format in the inbetween years, is the most highest achievement a club can achieve. So much so that he has had to mandate clubs that have qualified to bring their best players and play them – many have grumbled that they will only play second strings in what is effectively looking more like a pre-season kick about for less money that they would have achieved if they had organised their own pre-season trips to the US.
“Innovative, inclusive, ground-breaking and truly global, the new 32-team FIFA Club World Cup deserves a trophy that represents all of this. It is both prestigious and timeless – a golden trophy that is a symbol of the future and inspired by the past,” said Infantino at the trophy launch.
His effusion didn’t stop there. “The team who lift this trophy will hold the world of club football in their hands. To the players who win it, history belongs to you! Let’s take it to the world and celebrate it as we look forward to the start of a new era for football.”
Slightly overselling? Perhaps, but at last he has got his name on a trophy, lest we all forget his role in establishing this brave new club world of less money and more matches.
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