FIFA and Gianni Infantino are absolutely determined to ruin the World Cup – The Warm-Up

WEDNESDAY’S BIG STORIES

Step Away From The World Cup, Gianni

There is a certain kind of person – you all know them; some of you will be cooking Christmas dinner for them – who cannot encounter anything that is good, or even great, without immediately trying to make it better. This gravy is lovely. Hey, you could put some Marmite in it? These potatoes are delicious. Have you tried cooking them in swan fat?

Most of the time this is harmless, shading into annoying. But sometimes this instinct can be found in positions of real power, and that’s when it gets problematic. That World Cup was fun, right, if you consider only the sport and just the sport and don’t look at anything but the sport? Messi crying! Ronaldo crying! Fun? Yeah! So, right: what if we changed it.

Perhaps this represents a victory of sorts. Perhaps the idea of a two-year cycle has been bullied off the table. But it’s quite instructive to spend a month riding along with Lionel Messi’s last crack at a full trophy cabinet, and to see Argentinians celebrate the fact that he got there right at the last, and then to see football’s administrators think: what if we did this more often.

You can understand the basic instinct. More treats! More! Gimme! But the scarcity is the point. It’s what makes this all so powerful. The knowledge that even a player as great as him would only get a few shots at this is what drove Messi to distraction and then to triumph, through the bad tears of 2014 to the good of 2022. It’s what drove and is still driving, apparently, the people of Buenos Aires out into the street. This happens once a generation for fans of big nations, and that’s if they’re lucky. Great players get three or four, maybe five tournaments; mere mortals get two if they’re very, very lucky. That’s why it matters.

It’s impossible to say if four years is the perfect span of time between major tournaments, but it’s the one we started out with and by some happy alchemy, it works. Indeed, the fact that it still works, after all the myriad indignities that football has been subjected to by football’s custodians, is a testament to its power. And you’d think that might give FIFA’s braintrust a little pause. After all, their entire project is contingent on the World Cup still feeling powerful, still mattering to millions upon millions.

Maybe that will survive 48 teams. Maybe it would survive a three-year turnaround. But there has to be a breaking point somewhere, and the best way to find it is to start mucking around with the architecture.

Delete ‘World’, Replace With ‘Carabao’

It’s a proper hard swerve, coming back to the domestic season. Football came home a bit early, and then it barely had time to take its coat off before it had to head out again, into the cold, into the rain, into the constant low-level irritation of the English winter. Yes, the Carabao Cup is back.

Last night, Leicester, Newcastle, Southampton and Wolves all made their way through to the fifth round. Tonight, football’s most reliable generators of hot takes – apart from the World Cup, maybe – return to action. Manchester United vs. The Narrative. Manchester United vs. The Memory of Manchester United. Also Manchester United vs. Burnley. And honestly, you couldn’t have picked a better opponent. Burnley are top of the Championship, play extremely pleasant football, and are managed by a former Manchester City legend. The game probably won’t end with Vincent Kompany smashing a huge header into the net to win a title, but we’re not going to rule it out completely.

More pertinent, perhaps, is the fact that Burnley have played a couple of actual games recently, beating QPR 3-0 and Middlesbrough 3-1. The Premier League’s World Cup break has lasted longer, and United’s first team squad has been returning in dribs and drabs. In theory, most of United’s World Cup players are available tonight: Casemiro, Luke Shaw, Marcus Rashford and Bruno Fernandes. In practice, well, we might be about to find out how bothered Erik ten Hag really is by the Carabao.

More generally – and this goes for everybody, though Manchester United are a handy illustration – we suspect that the return of the World Cup players is going to be a strange and staggered thing. Most of the world watched Raphaël Varane collapse to the ground in extra time, utterly drained, and felt a rush of admiration and pity and perhaps some sympathy shivers through the legs. And Ten Hag the same, but with a little extra edge of “oh no”. Every player will come out of this adventure with their body in some kind of place, and their spirit in another; for the truly broken, we may not see them at their best for weeks.

Which in turn has interesting consequences for the rest of the squad. If Varane is given time to get himself back together, and Lisandro Martinez is still celebrating somewhere on the streets of Buenos Aires, then perhaps Harry Maguire, who went the whole tournament without a major disaster, has one last shot at convincing Ten Hag that he is a Manchester United player. The same for Donny van der Beek. And Alejandro Garnacho can add a another bucket of chum to the feeding frenzy. Football isn’t going to make much sense for the next few weeks, is what we’re saying. Also, Burnley are definitely winning this evening.

IN OTHER NEWS

We don’t mean to exaggerate, because exaggeration is the worst thing a person can do, but we’re pretty sure this, from Aberdeen last night, is the worst defending of all time. There are two attackers on the line of the six-yard box. There are six defenders arranged in a perfect lozenge around them.

RETRO CORNER

We’re not ready to let international football go just yet, and so we’re travelling back in time to 21 December, 1983, to take a look at one of those select football matches that has its own Wikipedia page. Spain trotted out onto the pitch at the Estadio Benito Villamarín knowing that they needed to beat Malta by 11 goals or more if they were to qualify for Euro ’84 ahead of the Netherlands.

Spain missed an early penalty, then eventually opened the scoring in the 24th minute. Malta equalised two minutes later thanks to an extravagant deflection. Half-time came and Spain were well behind the pace at just 3-1 up. And then… yep, that’s right, they scored nine unanswered goals in the second half, and off they went to France.

Naturally, allegations of corruption followed, along with some wilder suggestion the Spaniards were doped up and foaming at the mouth, or that Malta’s players had been given lemon slices laced with something unhelpful. Alternatively, a cheap hotel and poor training facilities may have been the culprit. Either way, Spain went on to reach the final fo Euro 84 and Marca, in 2020, called this “the greatest feat in the history of Spanish football.” We don’t know what the Dutch called it, but we’re guessing it’s unprintable.

HAT TIP

Instead, he says, they were shown a “hyperreal” Qatar, “where the nation-building is as berserk and synthetic as its football project.” And by way of contrast, he speaks to Samuel, a security guard, who would like but is not allowed to work as a taxi driver. He asks him if a nation as wealthy as Qatar should pay more. “[Samuel] told me he understood why they didn’t: it would create a perception of diminished motivation to work. ‘The economics of the global economy’, he said … The business of Qatar is coldly transactional: Samuel told me he didn’t have two feet planted here but one with the other hovering and darting in mid-air, looking for the next opportunity.”

COMING UP

It’s the last round of the women’s Champions League group stages this week, and today’s big game is Lyon vs. Juventus – the Italians need a win. Then we’ve got Manchester United 0-2 Burnley.

And we’ll have some more Andi Thomas for you tomorrow.