Buckle up for Gianni’s Club World Cup, the vanity project of an over-empowered demigod hellbent on extending the Gregorian calendar from 12 to 13 months in a push to squeeze more games in.
Football used to know when to pull down the curtain and turn off the lights. The old Home Internationals ran until the end of May and that was that until the first week in August.
This season feels never ending. Every time you think the campaign has finally croaked its last it springs back to life, eyes wide open like a zombie from Shaun of the Dead.
When Portugal won the Nations League final it felt like a natural full stop. Now here we are in the middle of June watching Bayern Munich smacking amateur teams from New Zealand around the chops as part of a farcical month-long, 32-team tournament no one asked for.
Football is turning into a year-long test of endurance, with no respite. FIFPRO, the global players’ union, have raised concerns over the health and welfare of players being pushed and stretched to breaking point by Gianni Infantino’s vaulting, self-serving campaign to be crowned King of Soccer.
The FIFA president has some powerful friends in his corner. Granted a VIP pass to Trump’s Oval Office and his golf hideaway at Mar-A-Lago, the head of world football now counts the POTUS as one of his besties.
In March he sat like the unelected chief of a banana republic roaring in laughter as The Donald compared him to a child who had just woken up on Christmas morning and found a giant pile of toys under the tree. For once, Trump was on the money.
It’s hard to put a finger on when – or how – Infantino became this all-powerful figure, capable of snapping his fingers and expanding the World Cup finals to a gruesome, bloated 48-team monstrosity offering free admission to the likes of Jordan and Uzbekistan.
Or how he managed to persuade anyone that a contrived club tournament featuring 63 games played across 11 cities in half-empty grounds was worth the time or effort.
The great American public seem unconvinced. While Trump’s election proved that they’re no strangers to a convincing scam, they’re hardly forming an orderly queue down Orlando’s International Drive to snap up cut-price tickets for Ulsan HD versus Mamelodi Sundowns.
The baffling part of all this is that Infantino used to be nothing more than a smiling, inoffensive man in a suit who served as master of ceremonies at the Champions League draw in Nyon.
Celtic or some other team would pop out the bowl and, as a hapless ex-pro fiddled with the little ball, the bold Gianni would fill the dead air by parroting the fact that the champions of Scotland were one-time winners in 1967.
There was no hint, then, of a FIFA president in waiting. No hint of a man poised to capitalise on the collapse of Sepp Blatter’s corruption-plagued regime with all the ravenous, rapacious hunger of a dog demolishing sausages.
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Infantino now flies around the world in his Qatari private jet rubbing shoulders with heads of state and taking the beautiful game to all corners of the globe, portraying himself as an international ambassador. Or, as he likes to put it, ‘an official provider of happiness to humanity’.
The God complex obscures the obscure back story of a bureaucrat who rose without trace; a power-mad plonker driving football to the point of physical and mental exhaustion in his quest for global influence.
Nothing sums up his tenure more aptly than European delegates staging a walk-out at FIFA’s Congress in Paraguay after he jetted in two hours late from meetings in Saudi Arabia and Qatar with Trump.
Infantino’s world is one where Europe knows its place. America matters as much as Austria. India holds as much sway as Italy. Saudi Arabia’s influence is greater than Spain’s.
That’s what the good politician does, of course. He draws the unheard and the disenfranchised into his orbit and gives them a voice.
Last year he turned up at a game between St Mirren and Aberdeen in Paisley before an IFAB gathering at Loch Lomond. Senior figures on Hampden’s sixth floor describe him as a charismatic, charming schmoozer with enough warmth to power an arctic outpost and, while European nations voted against his re-election in 2023, he seems to rub along just fine with the SFA.
Ultimately Infantino represents a world of FIFA soft power, where votes are courted by kissing a few frogs and flattering nations in unlikely – or unsavoury – corners of the planet.
That might explain why Spain and Portugal will share the hosting rights to the 2030 World Cup finals with the North African state of Morocco. Why the one after that will be played in Saudi Arabia, a nation which put up the $1 billion prize fund for the Club World Cup and, in an entirely unrelated coincidence, was subsequently handed the World Cup finals.
Next summer’s finals will be shared by America, Canada and Mexico and if Scotland are one of the nations who take advantage of a bloated 48-team format, Infantino will portray himself as the inclusive friend of the little people who made it all possible. If Steve Clarke’s team crash and burn in the qualifiers, he’ll go back to being the power-crazed despot ripping the heart from football’s soul.
A speech in Qatar’s National Convention Centre in Doha on the eve of the 2022 World Cup should have stopped the Infantino Express in its tracks.
In a 57-minute diatribe, journalists listened to FIFA’s main man lecturing western nations for their own sins over the past 3000 years.
Suggesting that his own experience as a red-haired, freckled son of Italian immigrants in Switzerland had given him a taste of what migrant workers and minorities in Qatar were going through, it was clear, then, that he had become hopelessly detached from the real world.
They said, then, that enough was enough. Yet all those columns, all those lectures, on One Love armbands and the scandal of Qatar sport-washing their reputation went for nothing in the end. What Infantino wants, Infantino gets and what Infantino wants most is to be football’s answer to Louis XIV, the vainglorious Sun King.
Laughably, he insists on his name appearing twice on the Club World Cup trophy. Where Panini albums used to be reserved for images of the managers and players, meanwhile, Gianni has somehow managed to insert his very own gold sticker at the front.
In hindsight Trump should have taken him to one side in the Oval Office and told him precisely where he could stick his Club World Cup.
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