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Fire up the marching band. Rouse the majorettes from their state of indifference. Put out more flags. Put out some flags. Put out a flag. Er … is anyone actually there? IShowSpeed? Can you hear me Pitbull? Welcome to the almost-World Cup, an almost-real almost-event that will perhaps, with a favourable wind, now begin to feel like almost-football.
This week Gianni Infantino described Fifa’s regeared tournament as football’s Big Bang, referencing the moment of ignition from which all the matter in the universe was dispersed out of a previously cold and indifferent void. And to be fair, Infantino was half-right. So far we have the void.
America, we have been repeatedly told, is ready for this, primed and hungry for Fifa’s billion-dollar event. The evidence on the ground is: maybe. But not in a way that you’d actually notice. Instead, as the Club World Cup builds towards Saturday’s opening night, Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami versus Al Ahly at the Hard Rock Stadium, this is a tournament that exists at the fringe of America’s densely packed attention economy, an ambient drawl of half-heard voices, noises through the wall.
The last week has brought almost-news of $4 tickets, star-player platitudes, immigration officials at the opening game. And all of this in a host city where people still look a little blank and say things such as: “The Club World-what?” and: “Actually I like hockey, but my nephew, he loves Cristiano Ronaldo, and let me tell you, what a body that guy has.”
This is a place where things keep almost-happening. Come and watch Inter Miami train on plasticised grass next to a private airfield, but no, not with Messi present. Wait! Infantino is giving a public address. Although it turns out he’s sent a video message (“un momento muy importante”) that people can video on their phones, while in turn being videoed by the official video crew, the only revelation from which was that Gianni appears to have acquired an excitingly badger-ish set of eyebrows. So there’s that.
Otherwise, at times it has felt as if the only publicity around this thing is occasional in-house footage of Infantino appearing at some sealed indoor hype-event, looking like a fringe member of the intergalactic royal family being held hostage in a luxury basement, forced to stand next to Ronaldinho and the drummer from Spandau Ballet, and talk only about massive stuff, huge things, the biggest.
Through all this, Infantino has become a slightly stretched figure. Understandably so. Here is a man charged with calling an imaginary sporting world into being, out there constantly saying things that are untrue about a thing that doesn’t exist to people who don’t care. Three days before the big kick-off it emerged that ChatGPT had simulated the entire tournament. Paris Saint-Germain beat Bayern Munich in the final. Do we actually need to play it?
And yet, of course, we do. And with a duty, not to Fifa, or to the revenues of tomorrow, but to the idea this game still belongs even in debased form to the people who care about it.
It is traditional at times such as these to hammer out a tournament preview, a distillation of all that stored excitement, the cultural collisions that have led to this place, the hard-edged imponderables of elite sport, the beauty in store. Hmm, yes. About that.
This will be difficult on this occasion because this thing is ersatz, a pop-up. Sport is culture, memory and connection. But this is all borrowed culture, a burger made out of Plasticine, the tournament equivalent of Qatar’s desert city of Lusail, with its fake Rimini, its imitation Paris.
It will be difficult because there are simply too many games, 63 of them across the next four weeks in 11 host cities, everything suitably maxed out in a country where even the act of buying a packet of crisps involves engaging with a sleeping bag full of violent toxic maize bombs, where there is a fear too many of these will be glazed, empty occasions, Warhol-ish performance pieces staged to capture a moment of perfect corporate emptiness. Next up: Ulsan HD against Mamelodi Sundowns at the Inter&Co Stadium Orlando. We’ll slide down the surface of things.
For all that there is a sense this must matter, because the clubs matter, that we can still ingest this thing like a sporting amphetamine, some kind of engagement generated from a standing start. There have been some odd staging decisions, but there are still epic collisions here, A-list teams in great American cities. River Plate versus Inter at the Lumen Field. Bayern and Boca Juniors at the Hard Rock. PSG and Botafogo in Los Angeles. Anything yet? A flicker of the needle?
For those who don’t have access to MLS there is a chance to see Messi again, here as a mobile marketing device, but also the most beautifully gifted footballer of the past 50 years. Real Madrid are genuinely interesting, the team of roving stars taking their first steps under a systems manager, crowbarred into new shapes before our eyes.
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The continuing rebuild of Manchester City is a live event. There are subplots, a Trent at Madrid arc, Simone Inzaghi squiring his new love interest, Al-Hilal, around the place with Inter also in the ballroom. João Cancelo has played for six competing clubs, so is in effect Mr Club World Cup, out there non-celebrating all his as yet nonexistent goals on the almost-biggest stage.
Is it good yet? Has it hit the bloodstream? This will be harder because of the unpalatable genesis of this thing, the fact it is in the end the work of a single autocratic leader. This is, of course, the over-empowered president of Fifa, with a sense at the big kick-off that only Infantino will feel any actual sense of ownership, eyes boggling on his executive banquette, legs in the stirrups, brow heaving as he births his personal god-league and holds it slithering to his chest.
It will be difficult because this entity is also deeply disruptive, a case of Fifa digging its fingers hungrily into every league and club in the world. For all the blather about inclusion, Europe has 12 teams here. Fifa is pumping most of that $1bn (£739m) prize pot into European club football, in many cases equivalent to a season’s broadcast revenue. What is its mandate for doing this? Fifa is supposed to oversee and regulate, not act as an investor-disruptor, some kind of football-bro overlord.
What other organisation allows this level of influence in one person, or lets its supposedly neutral leader cosy up to despots and political leaders, passing it all off, laughably, as Good for Football? So much so that the one element we know will cut Infantino to the quick is the fact Donald Trump will not be present at Saturday night’s opener.
Trump will instead be overseeing a huge march-past in Washington called the Grand Military Parade (a great parade, the very best parade). Gianni, I’m sorry. They always let you down in the end. By an odd coincidence it is also Trump’s birthday, which does at least raise the prospect of a smudged and woozy Infantino performing his own alarmingly sensual rendition of Happy Birthday Mr President on the half-time big screen in Miami.
On the day of Fifa’s opener there will also be 1,500 demonstrations across the US, including in Miami, under the banner No Kings, a movement that rejects the notion of Trump as a proto-regent in his wielding of power. Does this feel familiar, as if sport is again trying to tell you something, offering a front-row seat at the circus?
It even feels right that this should be happening in Florida, a place built out of tax breaks and real estate finagling, a vast sun-baked fun palace, and now the green sunken hub of the football world. Let the games begin. There is, for all the absence of pre-energy, a lot more at stake here than a Tiffany trophy.
