Fifa launched the four horsemen of avarice – but this World Cup somehow survived

On the radio this week, John Major said one of those things you desperately hope is true. The prime minister from 1990 to 1997 acknowledged that people feel “nothing works” in Britain, but argued that it’s “all repairable”. 

This optimistic take from the former leader of a party whose answer to the 2008 banking crisis was to ravage public services with austerity came to mind when Fifa’s compendious World Cup half-time show itinerary dropped.

Four horsemen of the apocalypse have stalked the great tradition of World Cup football. Actually more than four, but space is limited. Is Fifa’s disfiguring of the World Cup “repairable” or has Emperor Infantino’s shock doctrine left irreversible damage?

The half-time show comes in only as horseman No 4. Ahead of it are the peace prize to Donald Trump and the US president interfering directly on the field of play by having a suspended USA player reinstated. The sanity of this World Cup went bang before it started. Trump’s phone call about Folarin Balogun was its integrity-death.

At the last count (the updates keep coming) the half-time scene shifters for Spain vs Argentina will be squeezing Madonna, Justin Bieber, Shakira, Burna Boy, BTS, Gustavo Dudamel, and PS22 Chorus featuring alongside Coldplay into an 11-minute show on top of the traditional 15-minute interval: enough performers there for the average Glastonbury. Plus Sesame Street and The Muppets.

By then, unless you have a fence to creosote, or paint to watch drying, you’ll already have watched a pre-match closing ceremony boasting Post Malone, Tom Cruise, Laura Pausini, Nicole Scherzinger, Robbie Williams, IShowSpeed and Jennifer Hudson. Evidently a World Cup final needs celebrity blitzes to keep us engaged. To legitimise them, Fifa once again found a way round the regulations they’re meant to guard. The ruse this time is to frame the football and music stoppages as somehow separate events.

The Laws of the Game restrict half-time to 15 minutes, but Fifa trialled a 25-minute interval at their Club World Cup. The normalisation playbook of ignoring laws you don’t like speaks of osmosis between Fifa and the White House, where Infantino has schmoozed so eagerly.

There is another smaller harbinger (rider No 3), but this one, like the disciplinary committee’s capitulation over Balogun, could backfire on Infantino.

At least once in every half at games he’s attended, TV cameras pick him out on his plinth. The reason is an open secret in tournament TV compounds. The BBC commentary team even mentioned it during the England-Argentina game. The host broadcaster was obliged to show Infantino live at least once in each half. 

A Fifa president’s trick was always to give the member associations a big enough slice of the pie for them to tolerate just about anything. This summer, the 48 World Cup contestants will share close to $900m. A blizzard of commercial boasts is building. (“Twenty billion video views” by the quarter-final stage, with the Norwegian row leading the way.)

Snarky columns won’t stop football’s greatest tournament eating itself or impede tech-era plunder. Only internal resistance can, and here Uefa and others must stop grumbling behind their hands and take a lead. Infantino has made enough enemies to feel less secure than his body language suggests he thinks he is. (An aside: one wonders what happened to Arsène Wenger for him to feel comfortable in such company.)

Most will feel it’s possible to abhor what the World Cup has become but still stand with England or Spain or Cape Verde and let disgust occupy a separate conversation. Spain vs Argentina still feels like compulsory viewing, not least with its valediction at this level for Lionel Messi, the greatest player ever to play the game, and architect of the impeccable cross to Lautaro Martínez that killed England in Atlanta.

The point of maximum jeopardy for Infantinoism is when the football itself is violated, as it was with Balogun’s reinstatement, or the helping hand for Cristiano Ronaldo before the tournament (another suspended suspension); when the rip-off becomes too brazen to stomach, when the megalomania sours how people feel about that glorious, blessed thing - the football.

World Cups aren’t utopias. In 2018, Russia had already illegally annexed Crimea and used novichok in Salisbury when Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy settled into its seat. Qatar (2022) and Saudi Arabia (2034) have extinguished the presumption that human-rights observance is a pre-requisite for hosting.

With 78 of the 104 matches in America, this one rolled along in a post-truth world where international law is whatever the powerful say it is. We know all this. But what’s new is what’s been done to the tournament itself since it hooked up with Trumpism in a culture unencumbered by shame.

A fifth horseman might be the reinvention of football as a game of four quarters, not two halves, with lucrative ad breaks while players hydrate. With the precedent set, Fifa can be expected to sell those golden minutes of jingle time in all tournaments where heat is even a vague consideration – and eventually in all tournaments full stop.

In Mexico City, before it all kicked off, Infantino told everyone to “chill”. Back then he probably still felt like Teflon – omniscient. From this side of the Atlantic, he doesn’t look so clever now. To be permanent, his “victories” require our acquiescence. They don’t have to be.

Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images