You likely don’t read this column for football news. You read this column because someone in my family sent it to you once and giving up reading it now would seem rude.
It’s true, however, that I’d rather eat glass than wade into 99% of footballing discourse. And then, alas, there comes an omnishambles of such magnificent proportions that it is not merely a duty but a pleasure for me to pipe up.
I speak, of course, of the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, relaunched and revamped in a massively expanded format and currently broadcasting its feast of the global game to, oh, tens of people in its host nation of the US.
Where do we even start? Perhaps it makes sense to begin with the tournament’s, frankly, massive roster of 32 teams.
Each gained entry via rules that make the UEFA Nations League seem positively streamlined.
Describing even their broadest outline causes me great pain, so I apologise in advance for sounding like the Architect from the Matrix as I do just that.
So. Deep breath.
Twelve of the 32 teams are from Europe and six are from South America, with the remaining 14 teams coming from the rest of the world.
Some teams from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia qualify by winning their respective continental championships over the past four years, with one additional spot given to a single team from the Oceania region, and another for the host nation.
If you think this sounds a bit fiddly but broadly sensible, consider that further spots for European and South American teams are allocated on the basis of co-efficient rankings for teams who haven’t won their Champions League equivalent, which is how Red Bull Salzburg gained a place via the fact they were judged, to quote FIFA’s wording, “ninth-best ranked eligible team in the Uefa four-year ranking”.
Liverpool, despite being judged the fifth-best team in Europe in the same period, do not qualify because Man City and Chelsea have already qualified and no more than two European sides can be from the same country.
The same rule does not apply to South American sides, however, which is why there are four Brazilian teams in the competition and, dear God, there’s foam coming out of your mouth, so I will end things there.
The upshot is that this tournament is vastly overstuffed — very much the “meeting that could have been an email” of football competitions.
More teams obviously means more games, which means more revenue, but also more wear and tear.
At the end of a packed season, in an era where everyone in football can’t help groaning about how exhausted footballers — and punters — are by the number of games played, this already seems like a risky proposition to the world’s footballing giants.
The answer, I suppose, is to give them more money than any such competition has ever done before, with a reported $1bn prize pot spread across those taking part.
The wildly variable quality of the teams admitted, however, represents an unavoidable issue. These match-ups aren’t great.
Much has been made of the fact that Bayern Munich beat Auckland 10-0 in their first game.
It’s true that other hockey scores might arise as the tournament progresses but the main problem is that even the closer, more combative games lack stakes.
It’s why if England were playing Andorra in your next-door neighbour’s garden, you wouldn’t even look over the fence.
All that being said, the colossal failure of the competition still needs further explaining. Many news organs have reported — it must be said, quite gleefully — that ticket sales have gone from bad to worse to truly abysmal.
This was particularly clear during the match between Lionel Messi’s Miami and Egyptian side Al Ahly, which took place in a Hard Rock Stadium that looked like it had been evacuated due to a gas leak.
The Athletic reported that tickets for that game had plunged from $349 to $4 and drew a logical link between this and poor organising on FIFA’s part but also its craven acquiescence with the Trump administration’s increasingly draconian border policies.
Here, things get altogether less funny.
A few days before kick-off, both ICE and US Border Patrol were announced as providing “security” for the tournament.
Given that these are not first-response security agencies, this made little sense from a logistical or safety perspective.
It did, however, make abundant sense from an “arresting the sorts of people in America who might be overwhelmingly interested in watching football, specifically featuring foreign teams” perspective.
As such, a massive swathe of America’s most ardent soccer fans are staying home because they see this for what it is: Trump turning the entire tournament into a cardboard box propped up with a stick to ensnare migrants, and FIFA eagerly abetting him in this endeavour.
Perhaps its willingness to do so shouldn’t be a surprise, given FIFA’s track record of kowtowing to dictators and despots, from Russia to Qatar and incoming hosts Saudi Arabia, or its ancillary decisions at this very tournament, including removing all branding related to its anti-racism initiatives for fear it might stoke anti-DEI backlash from the hosts.
Which is why, despite the delicious schadenfreude of seeing FIFA landing on its arse like this, the Club World Cup is not really a laughing matter.
It’s a bloated mess and the worst conceivable advert for the game, one that no participating team can possibly enjoy and which no punters can show up to attend for fear they’ll be arrested and sent to a Salvadoran super-prison.
All this, so FIFA’s amoral profiteers can make a few more quid, makes for a sad, disgusting spectacle.
We should pity all 312 people still watching.
