By Tony Attwood
After days of telling us that Vinícius Júnior is not renewing his contract nad could be coming to Arsenal we read in the papers today that the player (note that – it is the player not the newspapers) “has ended summer speculation over his future by agreeing a new six-year contract with Real Madrid.”
They also say “Arsenal had been heavily linked with a move for the Brazil international” but that sentence ignores the fact of who he was linked by. And yes I admit we got swept up in that too. Sorry – it shouldn’t happen and we shouldn’t mention it, but yes we did.
Of couse that is not the only game that is being played with us. One of the great tricks played by the modern-day media is that of taking a crisis and claiming that either it can’t be solved because there is no workable alternative, or that if there is an alternative it will produce results that are actually worse than we are seeing now.
And this situation applies as much to football as it does to politics, economics or anything else that isn’t either art without rules, or something grounded in the cold logic of basic science.
To give an example, with football, until recently no one was asking why we actually need Fifa, or a body like Fifa. Fifa was formed in 1904, 18 years after Arsenal entered the Football League. Were Arsenal left just kicking the ball around without any understanding of how a game could be won or lost in those early years? No of course not, although judging by the way Fifa has acted since, those who have held official positions in the organisations seem to believe that without Fifa no one would have quite understood what “foot” and “ball” meant when said together.
Of course we need some mechanism to agree how many points a team gets for a win, and how a league table is calculated, but a body dripping with the niceties of international co-operation? No I think not.
Such bodies can help to get the game established, but with that there alwamys coes a problem: they always see themselves as more important than they actually are. More important than the ball, more important than the goal posts, more important than the referee and the players… in fact more important than anything.
Now obviously we tend to need referees to rule on disputes, or else players can end up like a bunch of children where the owner of the ball takes it away because the other side “aren’tplaying fair”. But somehow that simple notion of fairness gets transmuted into what happens when the team of one country won’t play the team of another country because one of those countries has politics the other doesn’t agree with.
In essence, football was a simple game – but before you know it you have a referees’ organisation and we all know where that can lead.
The point is that the simplest of games (kick the ball between the posts) becomes the most complex of affairs (he was offside by a mile ref,) and what was meant to be fun has become an argument or in the case of El Salvador and Honduras, an actual war.
As such, the original purpose of Fifa (agreeing a set of rules for the game in 1904) has long since been lost, and Fifa and its derivatives down to PGMOL and is subsiduaries then take on ever greater importance.
And there is worse, because as those subsidiary affairs have enhanced their own importance further and further, so the point of the game has got lost. Infantino is not watching football or drawing up plans for new competitions, but is frantically calling up old mates in the game and asking them to give him support next time they speak in public (which they seem to do quite a lot).
So what was Infantino’s crime? To figure out another way to raise money for football. So we have programmes, adverts around the ground, broadcast fees, shirt sponsors, transfer income and now selling off the World Cup stakes to investors. And why is that so bad? It seems just as bad as all the things we already had, to me.
In 2018, SoftBank,, the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia, put up the money for a Club World Cup which I seem to remember Chelsea won. The Nations League that went with it didn’t happen, but that seemed mostly because nobody could be arsed, but it served its purpose as Saudi Arabia got the 2034 World Cup while Omar Artan was denied entry to the USA to referee a World Cup match, and Folarin Balogun had his suspension suspended.
But still this is a world cup – and World Cups produce, well, dead migrant workers.
Which is in short, why Fifa are rather happy with the way things are going, because football fans worldwide could be upset with Fifa about its exploitation and general treatment of migrant workers, when anothere dictatorship wants some new stadia built.
Lord Triesman, once chair of the FA called Fifa a “mafia family”, and we seem to have forgotten that, but it is still true. The Guardian called it a “supralegal body operating beyond the boundaries of conventional politics or economics, operating under its own rules and its own moral code.”
But lurking behind all this is something rather unsettling – at least in England. Virtually all professional football clubs in England lose money. Infantino’s plan seems to be to break the rules in order to make even more money rather than lose it.
So what happens if it works? Here’s the conundrum that the media doesn’t seem to want to face. When everyone loses money, eventually everyone runs out of money. And what happens then?
