Club World Cup keeps football’s infinite content engine whirring

Everything about the football Club World Cup was designed to be dazzling. The trophy that will be awarded to the tournament’s eventual victor, for example, is so gigantic and golden that, as Gianni Infantino has been determined to point out, merely calling it a trophy is almost an insult.

“It is a masterpiece, a jewel,” the FIFA president said earlier this year. At the apparent recommendation of Jared Kushner, FIFA engaged Tiffany’s to produce it. “To craft this jewel, we had to team up with the masters of jewellery,” Infantino boasted.

It was the same with the prize money. Infantino declared that the participant teams would stand to earn $1 billion from the competition, a claim substantially more bullish by the fact that he made it even before he had secured the sponsors and the broadcasters and the ticket sales that would be needed to provide the cash.

The stadiums, too: The Athletic has reported that various executives within American soccer warned Infantino and his cronies – on more than one occasion – that they should look to use smaller, football-specific stadiums for games. Their reasoning was perfectly sensible: this is a new competition, one which features a host of relatively unfamiliar teams. The optics would be far better, surely, if it was played out against a backdrop of full boutique stadiums than hulking ones awash with empty seats.

It probably does not need saying that FIFA did not listen. This tournament is Infantino’s brainchild; he sees it as his legacy. His rhetoric around it has been consistently grandiose for the last couple of years. It is the game’s “pinnacle,” he has said. It marks the start of a “new era.” It will deliver “63 Super Bowls in one month,” as he told CNN.

And so the stadiums, like everything else, had to be the best, the brightest, the biggest. Infantino wanted the Club World Cup to be a manifestation of glamour and luxury and power; that, he believed, would infuse his tournament with instant, irresistible prestige, would turn an essentially ersatz, artificial construct into premium content.

There was something deeply heartening, then, about the fact that the very first game – the one featuring Lionel Messi, shoehorned into the tournament so that FIFA might once again weaponise his greatness – ended as a goalless draw. So, too, the knowledge that the best game of the tournament’s opening few days, a 2-2 draw between Boca Juniors and Benfica, was compelling not because of the standard of play but because of the three red cards, the brutal defending, and the simmering undercurrent of violence.

Sometimes, two apparently disconnected stories coalesce in unexpected and enlightening ways. I spent last week thinking simultaneously about both the Club World Cup and the Baller League. The angles of approach were distinct. The first was a story about how a tournament largely scorned in Europe – or certainly England – was being embraced by the rest of the football world, eager for a chance to borrow a little of the sunlight ordinarily ringfenced by the major leagues. The second was about what feels like a concerted challenge to the very nature of sport itself, an attempt to bring games largely codified in the Victorian Era into the age of TikTok and AngryGinge.

And then something that Felix Starck, the 32-year-old film director and architect of the Baller League, mentioned made it feel like the lines might be a little more blurred. It was ironic, he said, that his concept was derided as mere “product” when football in its full form – the sort being played out in the Club World Cup – was the one in which clubs were owned by nation states, the one dominated teams who had spent years shaping financial rules to suit themselves, the one in which sponsorship money from arms dealers and betting firms helped pay player salaries and agents’ fees that run into the tens of millions.

It is perfectly legitimate not to be convinced by Starck’s proposed solution to that, which is to blend the worlds of football and influencers and broadcast it all on YouTube, but that does not mean his diagnosis is incorrect. Indeed, part of the problem of the Club World Cup is that it feels like it has been conceived by people who view football not as a sport but as product.

That is most obvious in the ongoing dispute over its role in expanding the elite men’s game’s already engorged calendar, a subject sufficiently emotive and a problem sufficiently pressing that it has turned Fifpro, the global players’ union, and Javier Tebas, the bombastic president of La Liga, into relatively unlikely allies.

It is not too naive to assume that FIFA would like the football on offer in the Club World Cup to be of the highest possible standard. But it is also very clear that they have absolutely no understanding of how to make that happen.

It is bad enough that the tournament’s existence places yet more burden on the shoulders of already overworked, borderline exhausted, players. The timings of the games are absurd: no matter how well-conditioned they are as athletes, even the best players in the world cannot produce high-intensity football in the middle of a summer afternoon in Florida.

That does not matter to FIFA, though, because FIFA’s concern is increasingly not that of a sporting body but that of a content house. The players might be going through the motions, gasping for air. But what is important is producing the footage to sell to DAZN, FIFA’s broadcast partner, and then clipping it up and spreading it on social.

That is what made that opening goalless draw between Inter Miami and Al Ahly so significant: it is a reminder that, at heart, sport is not content. The difference between one and the other, between football as it has always been and football as Starck and those hoping to adapt it for the digital age would like it to be, is that the former does not have a duty to entertain.

The players and the teams are there, first and foremost, to compete. If it is compelling or engaging or thrilling for anyone watching, that is a happy byproduct, but it is not compulsory. Football, in that sense, has always been something of a connoisseur’s choice: it is a sport of rarity, of bursts, a game that rewards patience. Goals are celebrated so wildly because they come along so occasionally. There is a very real risk that any game that you might happen to watch could be intensely dull. That only serves to make those that are not feel more joyous.

And even when it is entertaining, as it was during Boca’s game with Benfica, it is not necessarily in the way that its overlords might feel comfortable projecting over their official channels. Boca’s approach was unapologetically robust. Ander Herrera was sent off for wrestling with a security guard. The game ended in a mass confrontation between the players. The fact that some goals were scored was very much a subplot.

That is part of the deal, though. Football, like all sport, is not confected or scripted or in some way fixed so that a certain type of entertainment is guaranteed. It is, on some level, wild and free and anarchic. You can spend millions projecting an image of glamour and power and luxury and get a goalless draw. It defies control. And that is the glory of it.

Photograph by AP Photo/Gregory Bull