Morning all.
Let’s start with the response from UEFA and CONCACAF to FIFA’s proposal’s, outlined earlier in the week, to essentially sell off commercial revenue streams to private investors. After widespread outrage, the European federation released a bombshell of a statement yesterday, saying (in part, full statement here):
UEFA and its 55 member associations stand as one. We unanimously and unequivocally reject FIFA’s proposal to transfer ownership interests in the World Cup and other FIFA competitions to private investors.
The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product. It is one of football’s greatest sporting legacies. It has been built over generations by players, national teams and supporters across every continent. No part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors. The World Cup is not for sale.
As a result of today’s discussion, no UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition for so long as these proposals remain alive, unless this proposal has been abandoned in its entirety and binding assurances have been given that FIFA will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership.
That was later followed by CONCACAF (The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football), who were less strident, but said after a meeting of its 41 member associations, that they rejected the proposal. FIFA then released a statement of their own, denying that they were ‘selling football’, by saying ‘Nobody is selling football’, which is quite funny given that they’re obviously and literally trying to do that.
It is, I’m sorry to say, pretty much exactly what I expected from them. Don’t back down, double down (hat-tip, Limmy). In this era of arch-corruption and people in public life behaving with outright malevolence to further their own power and influence, you just don’t admit any wrong doing. Even when your hand is caught in the biscuit jar, there’s photographic and video evidence of you showing your hand is inside the jar, and there’s also a pile of dead bodies you’re responsible for in order to get to the jar in the first place.
I hope I have, over the course of this summer, and previous to that, made clear my feelings about Gianni Infantino. I don’t believe I need to reiterate them, but just to be sure he is a stain on the game. A lickspittle to the worst people on the planet; an avaricious, amoral, unscrupulous, mendacious, vainglorious little grub of a man; and he feels untouchable and emboldened through methods and behaviours I think we all recognise as far more adjacent to a crime boss than the president of a so-called non-profit organisation.
But where are the other people in FIFA who purportedly care for the game? Why is there such complete silence from them? Arsene Wenger, a man who when he was manager of Arsenal, would have railed against such obvious corruption; a man who was the victim of absolute injustice as manager of Monaco; now has nothing to say. He sits in the same luxury boxes as Infantino, by virtue of his role at FIFA, but his silence is so, so disappointing. He’s not alone though, there must be others with positions of influence who can see this cash grab for what it is, but say nothing. I understand Infantino is powerful in terms of his position, but come on.
Regardless of what FIFA and Infantino try to tell us, if UEFA stand firm, there’s no way they can proceed with this – without causing an absolute schism in the international game, as well as FIFA’s various (and mostly pointless), club related competitions. Good luck selling a World Cup without Spain, England, France, Germany etc. Six of the quarter-finalists this summer were European nations. The best players in the world play for European clubs, without their participation in the ghastly Club World Cup, it’s a hugely diminished tournament. And while I’d never suggest UEFA are paragons of virtue themselves, in this instance I fully back their stance and, in a normal world, this would make Infantino’s position at FIFA untenable.
So, it doesn’t look as if FIFA are going to back down, putting the ball back into UEFA’s court, but for me there was no equivocation in their statement. They now have to demonstrate the kind of backbone that is required to stop this plan from going through, even if we’re likely to see Infantino run the full gamut of behaviours to make it happen. Threats, promises of conciliation, ‘incentives’ to walk it back, I think we’ll see it all, but I don’t think this is a negotiation. It can’t be, because if we know anything about Infantino, if you give him an inch, he’ll take a mile, and then there’s no going back.
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Meanwhile, there have been developments at Newcastle, where Eddie Howe left the job as manager yesterday with immediate effect. The suggestion is that a decision to sell Bruno Guimaraes to Arsenal was the straw that broke the camel’s back, after a summer in which they’ve already lost Anthony Gordon and Sandro Tonali, and missed out on key transfer targets.
The Bruno thing may well have been part of it, and there were reports that Arsenal have made progress in the pursuit of the Brazilian, with more developments expected over the coming days. He’s due back to Newcastle today after his World Cup commitments, so we’ll see if that actually happens. I do think as captain of the club, he has a responsibility to show up there until such time as things are sorted with us, so let’s see what happens. Let’s also take a moment to express the requisite amount of sympathy for Jason Tindall, Howe’s assistant, who is now jobless. And that amount of sympathy is not a single f*cking bit. Weird prick.
We talk about Bruno a bit on the latest Arsecast (recorded before the UEFA statement yesterday), and you can find that below. Have a great Friday folks.
