In the 1980s and early 1990s, using corruption, intimidation and assassination that he applied to the state and society, druglord Pablo Escobar controlled Colombian football as well as the elite South American continental competition, the Copa Libertadores. Though backed by a brutal criminal network, this was one man. Imagine the power and influence wielded by nation states or multinational corporations in collaboration with the game’s governing body?
This is what has been happening for decades, starting under Fifa president Sepp Blatter during the 2000s, and growing in the years after Gianni Infantino’s ascent in 2016.
Consider the speed, breadth and scale of Saudi Arabia’s invasion of football, the kingdom having been courted by Infantino. Sweeping moves have occurred domestically and globally, partly in response to Qatar being awarded the World Cup in 2022. (The two Gulf nations are rivals, with Saudi Arabia blockading the emirate between 2017 and 2021.)
The Saudi sovereign Public Investment Fund’s acquisition of English Premier League club Newcastle United in 2021 was high profile, and contentious, but the £305m price was a drop in its subsequent spending spree. Since then it has spent $6.3bn on deals to buy teams, players and clubs and to fund tournaments.
Apart from Newcastle, football lowlights have included the Italian and Spanish Super Cups being locked in to host their finals in Riyadh until 2029, Lionel Messi becoming a tourism brand ambassador for the petrostate, and, during the 2023/2024 player transfer window, nearly $1bn being spent to entice elite players to the Saudi Pro League. The league now has nearly 100 European and South American stars, Cristiano Ronaldo topping the bill with his annual earnings at a reported $200m. They play in front of crowds averaging 9,000.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman isn’t bothered about the impact on the game, nor about criticisms of his use of sport to wash away the state’s extrajudicial killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and to soften its shocking human rights image. “I don’t care. I have 1% GDP growth from sport, and I am aiming for another 1.5%. Call it whatever you want, we’re going to get that 1.5%,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview.
He could further congratulate himself last December when Saudi Arabia was awarded the 2034 World Cup. Football followers had assumed the absurdity of the 2010 Qatar announcement would never be repeated. If anything, it was outdone by Infantino’s virtual Fifa congress, whitewashing a decision he had already made, and enabled, by quashing any idea Australia may have harboured to formally announce a rival bid. “Wonderful, wonderful,” he applauded himself to the cyber-congress.
At least, before 2034, we can look forward to two tournaments in countries with genuine football cultures and more respectable human rights records. Except bizarre decisions have been made for 2026 and 2030 too. The former will be dispersed across the US, Canada and Mexico; 2030 will see games spread across three continents, involving Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
So much for climate-friendly plans. Co-hosting was supposed to have been scrapped after the Japan-South Korea event in 2002, but Infantino has proved even more adept than predecessor Blatter at horse-trading votes — strategised, always, to keep himself in power.
There’s a small but gnawing statistic in the wings for World Cups: 48 countries will now compete, not 32. This means the number of matches will increase from 64 to 104, adding to an already numbing surfeit of football. Football’s club, continental and global calendar is so crowded that another of Infantino’s money-making hobbyhorses, a new Club World Cup, was disdainfully rejected by the European governing body affiliate, Uefa, when he first proposed it. He was undeterred; though the pandemic paused his plans, in mid-2024 he formally announced the 32-club tournament, scheduled for June and July this year in the US.
The global players’ union, Fifpro, has threatened to strike, and has filed a complaint with the European Commission, claiming that the “oversaturated international football calendar risks player safety and wellbeing, and threatens the economic and social sustainability of important national competitions which have been enjoyed for generations by fans in Europe and around the world”.
Precisely. I’m not a football purist — I can be tribal in my support, and welcome changes such as video-assisted referee technology and the add-on of monitored injury time. But fans like me are uninterested in meaningless matches and unappreciative of the interference of accountants, lawyers, politicians and PR consultants to geostrategic players.
Still, Fifa isn’t solely responsible for this state of affairs. Club football, too, is tainted by excess and powerplays by corporates and countries
Despite Fifa’s nonprofit mission to administer and develop football, the Zurich-headquartered organisation operates in its own opaque interests.
Reforms were made after the US department of justice filed a 47-count criminal indictment for bribery and corruption against seven Fifa executives in 2015. Flowing from this, Infantino was elected to take over Fifa’s presidency in 2016, and he authored many of the changes that included presidency term limits and, designed to improve transparency, a drastic cut in the number of committees.
These have all now been rolled back. Infantino will serve until at least 2031, there are again about 35 subcommittees, and decisions on awarding World Cups are less transparent and more open to corrupt dealings than ever.
Fifa is accountable to no-one, and investigative journalists have, for decades, criticised Swiss authorities for their flawed regulatory framework and oversight. As of 2023 the Swiss attorney-general’s office had opened 25 criminal investigations into Fifa’s activities, and seized millions of documents, but secured just three convictions, with most cases being dropped.
Its billion-dollar profits certainly do not go wholly where it claims. South Africa’s World Cup Legacy Trust, for example, amounted to a squandering of a pledged $100m, with a cloak of secrecy thrown over attempts to understand what facilities were built, what youth football development projects it initiated, and why about R500m has disappeared with no legacy in evidence.
Still, Fifa isn’t solely responsible for this state of affairs. Club football, too, is tainted by excess and powerplays by corporates and countries. In England, the traditional home of football, domestic entities own just three of the 20 Premier League clubs. The league supposedly implements profit & sustainability rules (PSR), designed to keep clubs from risking instability or even insolvency by attempting to spend their way to success.
One of the effects is to favour the already obscenely wealthy clubs. Manchester City is owned by Emirati royal Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. The club is being investigated for 115 PSR breaches spanning the seasons since his acquisition, during which it has won the championship eight times — including each of the past four years.
In France, Ligue 1 is ruled by Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), which has won the league in 10 of the last 12 seasons. PSG is owned by the Qatar Investment Authority, a sovereign fund of the Qatari government. Its chair is Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who is also the president of PSG and not just a member of the Uefa executive but also chair of the European Club Association.
The conglomerates, hedge funds and sovereign investment funds have contributed to an extrapolation in the brand valuations of big clubs. The global king of the game, Real Madrid, tops Forbes’s 2024 valuations, at $6.6bn. Manchester City now has a brand value of $5.1bn, representing a 41-fold increase on Sheikh Mansour’s initial investment. Boston-based Fenway Sports Group has also done well out of its 2010 acquisition of Liverpool for £300m, the club now being valued at $5.37bn.
Football’s revenue streams have poured in from an expanding worldwide spectrum of industries keen to capitalise on the bubble. Real Madrid, during 2023/2024, became the first club to record €1bn in revenue in one season. The club president, Florentino Pérez, is unsatisfied. He wants to feed the money machine by establishing a European Super League, a closed shop for 15 elite teams that will no longer bother playing in domestic competitions.
These strands of commercial agglomeration are contributing to football’s draining fan appeal. The industrialisation of the game can be connected back to the field of play. There’s a passage in David Winner’s book Brilliant Orange, which condenses the Netherlands’ football philosophy, encapsulated within the small country’s societal values too: decency. “It’s a very deep, a very Dutch characteristic,” he quotes the writer Auke Kok, “so it is also very deep in Dutch football … We demand pure play.”
Decency has all but disappeared from the game in the 25 years since Brilliant Orange was published. Tactics are sterile. Globally, styles of play are nearly indistinguishable. Gamesmanship is out of control. Even in Brazil football is no longer called o jogo bonito, the beautiful game.
Fifa and Infantino — and other powerful figures — understand the power of money. What is clear, however, is that they are uninterested in balancing commercial interests with what is right for the sport. They should try to absorb lessons from the great Johan Cruyff, who said: “Professional football means money. It means achievement. Idealism, of course, means loving beautiful football. And it means never … making concessions about one or the other. They are equally important.”
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