Tippi Hedren sits on a bench outside the school. Behind her, crows gradually settle on a climbing frame. She smokes, distracted. By the time she finally notices a crow pass above her, it is too late. The frame, the roofs behind, the telegraph pole, the fence are laden with crows and the attack on the children cannot be averted. This is the greatest scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and it is also modern football.
Every week, there comes a new detail, stat or report of an initiative. Individually they can be laughed off. What’s the Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli banging on about this time? Who is Fifa’s Gianni Infantino abasing himself in front of now at Davos? Why has the Spanish Super Cup been rejigged with wildly variant appearance fees to try to put on a Clasico for the people of Jeddah? What’s the point of the Champions League group stage?
For almost a decade, four of Europe’s big five leagues have been dominated by one or two clubs. The disparity between rich and poor in the Premier League is so great that champions now get 95+ points, while in more than one in six games one side has less than 30% possession.
The richest clubs are getting richer within leagues, but the richest leagues are also getting richer in comparison with other leagues. The knockout rounds of this season’s Champions League feature clubs from the five major western European leagues. The last 32 of the Europa League features three clubs from eastern Europe.
The past four World Cup winners are all wealthy western European powers (only hapless England remain aloof and even they are improving). Players in those countries grow up with supreme facilities in a highly competitive environment, which may not be without problems but does tend to produce good footballers – as further demonstrated by Spain and Germany’s domination of Uefa youth tournaments.
Yet the rich demand more. This month it was reported the European Club Association wants four additional matchdays in the Champions League. Within a week, Pep Guardiola was calling for the abolition of the League Cup to ease the pressure on players. Manchester City’s manager may not agree with the ECA, but it hardly matters.
The various plans to streamline the FA Cup follow a similar pattern: having already enriched the rich to the point the smaller clubs can barely compete, the smaller clubs are to be starved of fixtures that generate revenue so the elite can play each other more often and make even more money for themselves.
Then there’s the Club World Cup, scheduled to begin in its new expanded format in summer 2021. It is not yet clear European clubs will compete but already the tournament has forced the Africa Cup of Nations to be re-rescheduled from June-July to January-February to avoid a clash.
Until last year, that is when the Cup of Nations had traditionally been played before it was moved so as not to interfere with western European club seasons.
The Confederation of African Football – which has essentially been run by Fifa since the beginning of August – insists the switch is a specific issue to do with the weather in Cameroon in June. But Cameroon’s climate is not dissimilar to that of Ivory Coast, which will host in 2023. Average June temperature and humidity is much the same in Yaoundé and Abidjan, but June rainfall is almost double in Abidjan. If the rainy season is the issue, the argument to move the 2023 tournament is much stronger. Mid‑January 2023, though, is three weeks after the World Cup final in Qatar. It’s almost as if African football isn’t the main consideration.
Fifa’s Infantino, in admittedly vague terms, has spoken of plans for a pan-African league to generate revenue, raise the standard of football across the continent and slow the drain of talent to Europe. That sounds a noble aim and if Fifa’s Club World Cup is to prosper, it requires strong clubs from across the globe. But a super league is a super league and a little probing suggests the idea would be for a closed format. Which raises an immediate question: if you are in effect franchising a league across Africa, can you afford Al Ahly and Zamalek, Hearts of Oak and Kotoko, Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs or would the great rivalries that have energised football for generations be lost? Not to mention the impact on clubs slightly further down the pyramid.
But perhaps that impact is coming anyway. If European clubs are to play in the Club World Cup, it will require enormous sums of money (the source of which raises a host of ethical concerns). The talk is of £40m-50m just to take part, with a prize fund on top. That will further widen the gulf between rich and poor in Europe, but elsewhere, even if clubs from other confederations get less, the distortion will be seismic.
To take just one example, TP Mazembe, who have won seven of the past nine league titles in DR Congo and three of the past 11 African Champions Leagues, have an annual budget of around £8.5m. What happens to Congolese league football when the dominant side is supercharged by the revenues of the Club World Cup?
The same pattern, the same enrichment of the rich, the same profanation of domestic leagues, the same shift to a quasi-franchise model is happening everywhere. It could happen globally. The Club World Cup is not about football. It’s about profit, because everything is these days, and Fifa’s battle with Europe’s governing body, Uefa, for control – the game’s regulators become financial competitors.
People don’t want to believe. They want to think their club is different. They want simply to watch the game. Haven’t the rich always been dominant? Yes, but to nothing like this extent. What about little Atalanta pipping oligarch-owned Shakhtar? Yes, there are exceptions. It’s football: random stuff still very occasionally happens; Leicester’s Premier League title in 2016 is the greatest propaganda the superclubs could ever have dreamed up.
Wake up! Turn around, have a look at that climbing frame and ask if this is what you want football to be.