Why it is really important for Arsenal to stay well away from the Club World Cup

 

 

• Transfers stalled, prices rising: it’s summer
• Football is at breaking point: not everything can grow all the time

By Tony Attwood

In America, President Trump and Rupert Murdoch are having a battle.  It is being played out in front of the world’s media, and the world’s media is lapping it up.

And I mention this because it struck me that when powerful heavyweights turn against each other in the USA, we read about it.  In short, all hell breaks loose.

But when in the UK multi-million pound deals for players involving Arsenal are written about in the media and then when 97% of them never actually happen, no one seems to blink, except occasionally to put the blame on Arsenal.

Now of course, you could argue that there is no connection.  In the USA, we are talking about the most powerful man in the Western democracies fighting the owner of hundreds of media outlets worldwide, including the Sun and the Times in the UK.  Murdoch was also the owner of Sky until 2018 and is still the owner of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and the like in the USA.

But even though the President’s current spat is nothing to do with football, I am taken by the fact that the President is suing the publisher.   This obviously doesn’t happen in football.  97% of the transfer stories talked up by the media are untrue, but no one says a word.  But bring in Trump and all hell breaks loose.

The argument in the USA is that the President wrote or at least contributed an idea to a letter which incorporated some dubious bawdy references to a convicted child sex offender (Jeffrey Epstein).  This allegation is made by one of Trump’s guests at the ludicrous Fifa Club World Cup final.  As such the credibility of the Club World Cup is immediately under question.

What happened was pretty dumb, but quite probably not illegal.  It just doesn’t reflect very well on those involved.  Nor on the organisations they are associated with.  Such as the Club World Cup.

Of course, there is no implication that Chelsea, by winning the very little cup, is involved – but they did accept the invite to play in the competition, knowing that President Trump would be presenting the prizes, and that President Trump is endlessly mixed up in some pretty nasty and pretty serious allegations.  A very good reason in fact, for Arsenal to stay away, I would argue.

But I suppose what makes it hard for those of us in England to put everything together is that it seems to be quite normal these days for the President of the United States to be talking up the latest Fifa manifestation, the Club World Cup, and then suing a reputable journal for printing an allegation that the President had demanded should be cut.

The point is that Trump has the view that he and his cronies should never be subject to allegations and negative reporting.   And in considering this, you might also imagine what would happen if Arsenal FC were seen to be above allegation and negative reporting; the club would never be mentioned at all.

You might remember that after the mobs stormed the US Capitol in 2021, Trump gave them unconditional pardons.   One might imagine some hooliganism breaking out at a football match in the US, and again, the President steps in to pardon everyone because he is backing the competition.

Or maybe consider the USA being knocked out of a competition early on.  I suspect the President might say, “It was fixed.. clearly fixed, so we are going to unfix it.”  The result is overturned, the USA team continues in the competition.

Trump works to close down publications that disagree with him (as when he took on the Wall Street Journal when it called the tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico as “the dumbest trade war in history”).  And he works to fix events so that they come out with the result he wants.

The fact is that we have no idea which way Trump is going to leap next, save that he is aligning himself with Fifa, and the Club World Cup, and that fact should be incredibly alarming for all of football.

For years, this blog has been warning about the way in which Fifa runs football, and how it is willing to manipulate any situation to suit itself – as when the chairman of the Court of Arbitration in Sport was nominated for the post by Manchester City.  And then he obligingly overturned Manchester City’s ban from European competition because the case was suddenly “time-barred,” seemingly something that no one had ever noticed before.

And indeed, one might add it was something that the media in the UK didn’t question or even mention thereafter.   We were simply told that UEFA lost their case.   No one asked how that could have happened, or why it happened, or whether those who allowed it to happen were still in their jobs.    No, we were never told, because the CAS panel chairman, Rui Botica Santos, was recommended for the post of chairman by Manchester City.

That looked just a little bit too close to the mark to some, but most of the media never even mentioned the fact..

So here we are again, a time when the normal rules and the normal order of things are just swept aside.  And the implication is clear.   Whatever happens with the Club World Cup, or any of what I expect will be its multiple offspring, Arsenal should stay well out of the way.  It’s never going to be run like any other competition we know.  Except that subsequently, we will probably find other competitions, somehow coming into line with the Club World Cup’s way of thinking.