CORPORATE SHILLING FOR CLUB WORLD CUP

BUT THERE'S A TWIST 🌪️

I’m gonna sound like a corporate shill here, but I can wrap the thought in something that sounds progressive and makes you sound privileged for not agreeing with me.

Ok, here goes… I’m excited about the Club World Cup.

So, let’s get the bad bits out of the way.

It’ll struggle in its first year because it’s new, it’s in a country that is VERY hard to penetrate with new ideas (look at how many have tried to rival the NFL), and the pricing was way, way off.

But… the Euro snobs have been enjoying their richly assembled leagues with the best players all to themselves, and it’s left the rest of the world out in the cold.

This new tournament—of which no one has any idea how you gain entry—presents an opportunity to take the magic of the Champions League and make it GLOBAL.

Sure, Al Ahly vs Inter Miami was NOT a spectacular opener, but damn, we’ve got some weird lineups today:

• Bayern vs Auckland

• Palmeiras vs Porto

• Botafogo vs Seattle

• River Plate vs Urawa Reds

• RB Salzburg vs Pachuca

I know what you’re thinking… what did Porto and Salzburg do to get into this £100m competition? No one knows. That’s the magic of the competition. You might just find yourself in it one day. Doesn’t matter if it’s merit-based; if you know someone, who knows someone, you could find yourself at the top table for no reason, and that’s kind of magical if you think about it long and hard and take a psychedelic to cement the logic.

But putting that murkiness to one side… we’re finally getting the games we’ve never really seen. Premier League teams don’t tour Brazil, Argentina, or New Zealand. But those places have MASSIVE clubs. And I’d like to see how those teams match up against ours. These games technically shouldn’t be driven by marketability, but by sportability. You hear me? That sounded way dumber than I hoped.

Bigger picture here: it’s a good idea, but it’s at a horrible time, and it’s not at the expense of something. FIFA are just filling a gap that should be given to players to recharge for a GIANT World Cup next year.

The bad part about all of this is more minutes on players who are already complaining in the media that they’re broken. Put the complaints to one side—tired players play at a less intense level, and they spend more time injured. Is that good for the product? It is not.

But the harsh reality of elite-level sport is players are paid handsomely to take their bodies to the limit. You shouldn’t feel sorry for them; you should help support them in taking things to the max within the confines of a safe environment.

That, for me, can be solved by creating bigger squads. Why are we ramping up the minutes, jet-fueling the intensity… and not telling clubs they can have 30-man squads moving forward? I mean, Chelsea have already done that, but it should be more acceptable.

This is a tangent here, but I think ‘Netflix and chill’ has been one of the most damaging cultural shifts of recent times and we don’t even recognize it. Creating a cool vibe around the idea that sitting in front of the TV and binge-watching series is f*cking nuts when you look back on it. It’s the softer side of tuning technology to glue you to slabs of glass that rot your brain to dangerous levels (the hypocrisy of knowing I have used dark psychological tricks to get your here today to read this prose on a slab of glass is not lost on me. KEEP READING).

Well, sport appears to be doing the same—particularly football. Now, I know there’s been a storied tradition of sitting in front of the TV all day, ripping light beers (yes, America, we all know that you drink light beers), and having good times with a sport. But it had a set day, and it was special.

If you’re an English football fan now? You have football all the time. Three domestic competitions. Preseason tournaments. Postseason games. Three different European cups. Five subscription models. Expensive tickets at stadiums. Three separate kit launch videos a year. Fifteen merch drops. Clubs are even selling £400 decorative vases. A world-class women’s team, with domestic cups, midweek games, and European glory days out.

Now… a Club World Cup.

To top it all off, I ask you to read seven blogs a week and listen to five hours of podcast content.

It. Is. A. Lot.

Now, we mostly love it, but television numbers dropped this year by 10%. There are a catalogue of reasons for that, but it’s really hard to move past the idea that we’re reaching a level of peak football out here… or even peak sport across all TV channels.

If you’re reading this post right now, you are part of the sicko brigade. You’re not going to fatigue. You’ve been hitting the football fiend pipe for so long your teeth are falling out… but I do wonder more broadly if the operating bodies are going to have to get back to some basics, because it’s going to be hard to make people care about all of it. There’s not enough time in the week to be dedicated to this much sport, and there’s not enough energy or players to deliver a world-class football product.

The NFL gets it right. There’s a set number of teams. A set number of games. There’s plenty of downtime between seasons. The games are TREASURED. The product is exceptional. They evolve the game, push the boundaries of tech, and they make it all event viewing. They don’t do EPL numbers globally, but they are making moves in that direction—and they’re taking the product on the road with great success.

Will football get back to its roots? Or will the competing nature of UEFA, FIFA, and the domestic leagues just be a fight for more minutes with diminishing returns of quality?

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