The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing

I wasn’t immune to the recent World Cup. Even though the Republic failed to qualify and so I had nobody to root for, it was still the biggest spectacle on the planet for a few heady weeks this summer.

But for me the real drama in the sport of football is not on the field but in the boardrooms and offices in which the sport is managed. Who needs to watch Messi when you can observe the manoeuvrings and fumbles of FIFA’s President Gianni Infantino?

Infantino was elected President of FIFA in 2016 following the resignation of his scandal-prone predecessor Sepp Blatter. Blatter had overseen an organisation that appeared to those of us on the outside to be hideously corrupt with the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar being a particular low point.

Infantino came to power promising to turn the page on the Blatter years. At the time, he was quoted in Reuters as saying

“I will work tirelessly to bring football back to FIFA and FIFA back to football, this is what we have to do.”

But if you were suspicious of his fine statements a decade ago, I believe time has proven you right, for what has Infantino done as President of the body overseeing the world’s biggest sport? To me it looks like he has sought every opportunity to nickel and dime the game that he possibly can and this approach has infected the entire organisation.

FIFA proposed a few years ago to hold the World Cup tournament every two years rather than four. The motivation to me was transparently obvious, stage the biggest tournament more often to generate more revenue from it. That’s from TV rights, licensing, merchandising rights and of course more opportunities for the competing countries to ‘outbid’ each other with FIFA’s elite as they vied for the rights to host the competition. It loses sight of the intangible quality that sometimes the magic and prestige of an occasion is bound up in the rarity of it.

I would argue that this materialistic motive is what lay behind the desire to expand the format of the competition from 32 teams to 48 and maybe even to 64 at a future tournament. More teams means more games means more revenue and of course more countries means more engaged publics willing to spend, spend and spend.

Now I am not going to argue such an expansion is purely without merit, after all the more countries involved the bigger the party and Cape Verde’s amazing run at the recent World Cup proves expansion can create genuinely unexpected delights. Yes, smaller countries that may otherwise never see a World Cup now have the opportunity to do so because of expansion, but at some point you do broaden the scope of the competition to the point the earlier rounds become meaningless and it devalues the quality of the tournament overall. Frankly, the benefits to smaller states seem to me to be merely incidental to the true underlying motive, making money.

Alongside FIFA’s seemingly relentless quest to barter the soul of the game they are tasked with safeguarding to the highest bidder, there is the distasteful spectacle of Infantino’s cynical posturing on the world stage, particularly his cosiness with Donald Trump and his willingness to tolerate the man’s whims. Remember how the Iranian team were heavily restricted in their access to the United States for their own matches and FIFA did nothing? Or how a fully qualified Somali referee scheduled to officiate at the cup was turned back after landing at Miami airport and there wasn’t a peep from Infantino? Or how, following a red card being awarded to an American player that would have normally necessitated he sit out the next match, Trump’s intervention seemed to show FIFA bending if not breaking their own rules to appease him? And could there be any spectacle more cringe-inducing than when Infantino awarded Trump the ‘FIFA Peace Prize’, an award clearly created to be given to the American President and soothe his bruised ego over being spurned for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Yes actually, when declaring his intention to stand for re-election of FIFA a few months ago he called high-ranking representatives of the Israeli and Palestinian Football Associations on stage to shake hands in a stunt. It was an act of such breath-taking cynicism, to take the platitudes of ‘the unifying power of football’ and attempt to bounce the Palestinian FA President, Jibril Rajoub into a manufactured photo-op to produce a feel-good moment to serve as the backdrop for Infantino’s announcement that for once I thought someone had managed to outdo Trump when it comes to bad taste. Has Gianni Infantino actually paid attention to what has been going on in the world these past few years or is the situation in Gaza merely an unfortunate complication in his drive to have everyone play football and give FIFA a cut of the action when they do?

But has Infantino finally gone too far? Last week he launched a proposal to effectively privatise the World Cup (both national and club) by creating a subsidiary, Fifa Forward Enterprise. And the reason this has gone so wrong for him and created a backlash he is struggling to contain, with UEFA even threatening to boycott the World Cup in an attempt to force him to quit?

UEFA sums it up for me in one paragraph in a statement on the matter

The moment external investors acquire ownership interests in FIFA competitions, football changes forever. Commercial return becomes a permanent obligation. Investor expectations become a daily pressure. From that moment onwards, every decision on the international calendar, every decision on competition formats and every decision shaping the future of football is no longer driven by what best serves the game, but by what best serves shareholders.

Every other sport that has the world’s attention is subject to the same forces. And it is not just sport, look at any sphere of entertainment or ANYTHING that brings joy to people, and you’ll see the same process at work in differing forms and at different paces but the same mechanisms at play. Movies, music, video-games, books, anything that can make a billion dollars is feasted upon by those who care nothing for the talent of athletes or artists involved and who merely ask if they can make a billion more. No amount of money is ever enough or will ever be enough.

What is happening with Infantino and FIFA is merely a particularly egregious example of what is happening in nearly every walk of life. I am not saying capitalism is bad here as if that is some kind of self-evident truth, that is far too simplistic. I am saying that we are seeing the outcome of a world where capitalism has been unshackled and wherein everything is fodder for consumption, where the powerful can price everything but don’t understand the value of what they haggle over so long as a line on a spreadsheet somewhere is endlessly going up. The balance has been completely lost and I don’t know if it can ever be found again either.