By Tony Attwood
If you are a regular reader of Untold, you’ll know that from the off we have been against international (as in country v country) games of football. The argument is simple: the clubs pay the players’ wages, the clubs work to keep the players fit, and the players already have exhausting schedules. Country associations get involved in none of the clubs’ essential preparation and training work, but pick up players as and when they demand it, play them (injured or not), hand them back and say “have them ready for next time”. It has been ever thus.
Quite why the clubs put up with it I have never been sure, but I suspect it is a lack of organisation by the clubs, a desire for players to travel first class, and a worry that the international bodies might retaliate in some undefined way.
But now the in-fighting as taken a new turn as Fifa and Uefa are effectively at war with each other. It is not quite what I had in mind in terms of international reform, but in the absence of anything else, it might be a good step in the right direction.
So Uefa has told Fifa in no uncertain terms that this time it has gone too far in making what Uefa calls an “incomprehensible and unjustifiable” decision to allow Folarin Balogun’s suspension to be cast aside. To say, as some of the media have done, that “Ceferin has effectively put European football on a war footing with the world governing body” is maybe a bit over the top, given the ability of sub-Fifa organisations to back down in the past, but even so, this could be the moment we have been waiting for.
Trump, Infantino, and Ceferin have changed the world of football for the worse by deciding that they can make instant decisions about a sport that has evolved slowly and often (although not always) carefully since the first FA Cup matches came along in 1872. And they haven’t done this by mistake. They have charged in with the assuredness of playground bullies taking on kids half their age and half their size. But for once they have found the rest of the playground has reared up and said “enough.”
Infantino has, of course, been treading a dodgy path since he came up with the Club World Cup nonsense eight years ago, and Uefa has rather cleverly been biding its time to launch its torpedoes. It watched the growth of the WC finals with the proposal now of moving the Club World Cup up to four dozen teams in 2029, and it looked like they might get away with it, until at last, the rest of the world has found a cause it can combine against.
Finally, finally, football has realised how vulnerable these two giant bodies (Fifa and Uefa) actually are, for they make all their money from competitions that depend 100% on the co-operation of the clubs. Indeed it is often noted that last year Uefa made around €5,000,000,000 out of the Champions League. And that’s in one year! And all for pulling numbers out of a hat, and then sitting and watching the clubs take the risks (in terms of injured players and dead rubber matches at the end of the sequence). And let’ss be clear, it is not Fifa and Uefa that take risks – the TV rights are sold way in advance.
But of course you know what it is with the downright greedy; they are never satisfied. They want more, and feeling that they are all-powerful gods, they demand more. If the clubs say they don’t have any more cash, they turn to commercial sponsors and offer more, and then tell the clubs they have to change what they do, to accommodate what capitalism wants.
But greedy bastards never know how to stop, and Fifa doesn’t like Uef a dominating club football with its annual competition, so it is now expanding and enlarging its own WC (world cup).
And like all little children who are used to getting their own way, they are in “take it or leave it” mode, as when the Europeans got up and walked out of the Fifa congress in protest at Infantino turning up late.
True, the media are a bit uncomfortable about two of its mainstream sources of summer football news behaving like little children fighting in a playground and so they want concessions if they are to go along with this nonsense. So Uefa promises no water breaks at quarter time, and allowing in referees who the Americans wouldn’t allow into their country for the WC to run their matches. And then with all that running, along comes Balogun.
Uefa now openly hates Fifa, and the feeling is there both among the troops and at führer level as well. At the moment we are at the stage of executives not turning up at each other’s shows, which means that the leaders of Fifa and Uefa don’t get to talk very much. Indeed, each organisation is rife with petty jealousies neither side knows what the next one will do. One option really now is that one of the two big football bodies will take the other to court over something or other.
That in turn would use up vast amounts of the two gangs’ funds. Then, by the time they come back to the clubs and regional associations with begging bowls, they could well be told to bugger off, and we could at last see the reform that football at international level is so overdue.
