Is the way international football organised really the right way forward?

 

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By Tony Attwood

The thing about pre-season matches is that if you win handsomely it is a great indicator for the year ahead, and if you lose, well, it was just a try out to show some of the newcomers how tough this is going to be, and anyway, look at who was missing from the lineup.

After last night we are obliged to choose to latter approach.   If you wanted to see some cock-ups in defence there they were.  Except that when Artea sent out the same side as won against Girona we thought maybe it could be ok, but I am not sure that is quite right.   The reserves are not the first team in disguise.  They will get better, but it needs to happen quite soon.  They are not ready yet.

Still I suppose on the other hand we have to say we don’t want the new signings and promoted players to be ready too quickly and the best we can say is that they are not ready just yet.   I haven’t looked it up, but I seem to remember we have had one or two poor openings to pre-season in the past and then come good, so we’d best not say it is all over before it starts.

But we did see Marli Salmon (age 16) at centre-half, for the second half although I am not convinced by Kepa Arrizabalaga, but I guess the boss is.   Christos Tzolis missed one he should have scored but did get one from a header.   So maybe we just say that the boss is showing these players how far they have to go before they get to the top level.

Elsewhere Infantino has admitted he had talks about forming a “Fifa Super League”way back in October 2020, this being another idea of his – this being dropped in April 2021. And you might have thought he’d have learned his lesson then, but no, he had to bring it all back again this year.  He did however get involved in one good idea – that is reducing the number of international breaks – but sadly that never happened.

Those plans included a regular large scale annual Club World Cup, as a straight knock out competition along the lines of the FA Cup.  And what is particularly interesting there is that quite a few Fifa top brass and their staff were involved in setting up the plan.   As with so much of Fifa’s work it came to nothing but it remained lurking in the backwaters ready to be pushed out again when the next crisis appears.  You know, you really can’t trust these Fifarians at all.

Indeed what comes out of all these discussions and old documents is the fact that Fifa seems to spend much of its time coming up with ideas for new competitions and new ways of arranging old competitions, and then doing nothing about them because the members of Fifa don’t want anything to change and it really does seem a most curious way of carrying on.   Might it not be better just to scrap the whole concept of country based matches and simply let the clubs get on with running the show?

I’ve not been involved in football organisations but from work within other business operations it has seemed to me that when there are multiple attempts to change the very nature of the operation, and it never happens, there is something going wrong and a serious look needs to be taken at how things are working – and not working.

In the Fifa proposal, reported by the Guardian, the newly formed world league would have “15 permanent members and five clubs qualifying from existing competitions,” and there would be a women’s set league set up in the same way.  

So it looks like Fifa has been mucking around with odd proposals for years, but none of them have come to pass.  I guess the correct phrase would be “Same old Fifa, always fiddling”.  Of course new ideas do need to be put forward and discussed from time to time, but to have complete re-writes of the whole operation occurring regularly seems rather destabilising.

But it raises another question: is this the model throughout football?   I’m currently working on a history of Arsenal in the league in the club’s early days in Plumstead (the last one was Marginal improvements 1895/6) and if you have a chance to read any of those you’ll see just how unstable to league was in the early days with clubs coming and going regularly, and a significant gap existing between the the big clubs and small clubs.

It seems world football is going through a similar sort of wobble period now, with no one quite sure how to organise everything, and no ability to learn from history.   Certainly it seems to me to be nonsense that you have major, huge countries like Brazil playing against tiny states in the same competition, just so the little countries can be beaten each time.   What is the point of that?