The beautiful game at an ugly price

Now the World Cup dust has settled, Mr Infantino is in his ivory tower counting his billions and Argentina have learned kicking, diving and Messi are not enough to win the trophy, we can look back on the tournament with a better sense of perspective.

And, purely as a football competition, it wasn’t that bad. There were good matches, great goals, proper shocks and enough drama to justify spending six weeks rearranging your life around the erratic kick-off times.

Ultimately Spain were worthy champions and, as a bonus, Argentina didn’t win, sparing us four years of being told that surrounding referees and starting fights constitutes ‘admirable street wisdom’ when performed in a blue-and-white shirt.

At an organisational level, the tournament worked too. Moving 48 teams through three  countries and playing 104 matches without the whole thing collapsing into a smoking crater was impressive. The stadiums were excellent, the technology behaved itself and the football, despite fears that expansion would dilute it, remained competitive.

Unfortunately, despite the positives, this will not be remembered as Spain’s World Cup but as the World Cup of greed.

FIFA took the greatest sporting event on earth and shook it vigorously until every last dollar fell out of its pockets.

A combination of dynamic pricing and pure, unadulterated avarice that saw FIFA take a slice whenever a ticket was resold at an obscene price on its own platform, pushed ordinary supporters out of the market. Rather than clamp down on ticket touting, this was the tournament where this practice got the organiser’s rubber seal of approval.

Then came the hydration breaks, three-minute interruptions midway through every half of every match, regardless of the temperature or whether the stadium was air-conditioned. FIFA insisted these were purely about player welfare. Of course they were. And the fact they conveniently turned football into four television-friendly quarters, creating commercial slots estimated to be worth a billion dollars to broadcasters, was presumably just an astonishing coincidence.

These were not hydration breaks. They were advertising breaks with water bottles.

Then, just when you thought FIFA had finished pawing at football’s traditions with its greasy commercial fingers, the World Cup final arrived with a 27-minute half-time interval and a concert involving Madonna, Shakira, Justin Bieber, BTS, Coldplay, two orchestras, 350 performers and the Muppets.

The World Cup final does not need a performance by a muppet... it already has Infantino.

All this helped FIFA generate an estimated $13 to $15 billion, which explains why the organisation now regards every footballing tradition not as something to protect but as an inconvenient obstacle between it and another sponsorship deal.

The sad part is that the football survived. It frequently entertained, occasionally thrilled and ultimately produced the right winner. But that almost feels incidental. FIFA did not stage this World Cup so much as strip-mine it, selling the soul of the world’s greatest sporting event to the devil of the dollar. And you can be certain the dollar devil has already renewed his hospitality package for 2030.

FIFA did not stage this World Cup so much as strip-mine it

When bronze turns golden

I had every intention of not watching England play France in the third-place play-off.

It is a ridiculous fixture, staged between two teams still emotionally concussed from losing their semi-finals and now being asked to determine which of them is slightly less heartbroken.

Nobody dreams of finishing third at a World Cup. There are no children in parks slotting the ball between two piles of jumpers and then wheeling away shouting: “Yes! Bronze!”

So I left the game on in the background, determined not to become involved.

Then Declan Rice scored after three minutes and my determination wavered. Ezri Konsa made it two. Bukayo Saka added another and, by half-time, England were 4-0 ahead and my determination had completely shrivelled up. Suddenly, the meaningless match I wasn’t watching had become considerably more entertaining than most of the meaningful ones I had watched obsessively.

France then remembered they were France, scored three times and turned the second half into glorious chaos. Saka completed his hat-trick, Jude Bellingham eventually made it six and England won 6-4, which is less a football score than something you would expect to see after the first set at Wimbledon.

It was magnificent precisely because it meant so little. The pressure had gone, the tactical handbrakes had been removed and both teams played with the freedom of men who knew the history books would afford it little more than a footnote. It was what football can look like when managers aren’t managing with fear sitting on their shoulder.

I still don’t believe the third-place play-off should exist. After losing a World Cup semi-final, players should be left to go home, lie in a darkened room and avoid social media for a fortnight.

But if FIFA insists on staging it in the future, then the very least the two competing teams must do is promise to approach it with the gay abandon adopted by England and France.

It was a game few people wanted to watch, but had we known how little entertainment the final would provide the following day, we might have treated it as the main event.

Bigger may be better

The instinctive response to FIFA considering a 64-team World Cup is obvious: absolutely not!

It would mean around 30 per cent of FIFA’s members qualifying and so much football to be played over such a short period that even the highlights programme would need a highlights programme.

Qualification would be diluted, the group stage would contain more mismatches, and exhausted players would face an even more bloated calendar. Coming from Infantino, it also feels less like an act of sporting generosity and more like someone discovering another row of udders on the cash cow.

But are we being entirely fair?

The World Cup calls itself a global competition while historically reserving most of its seats for the big powers. For supporters in smaller nations, qualification is not routine; it can be the greatest sporting moment their country has ever experienced.

Cape Verde’s presence this summer mattered. It gave its players, supporters and the entire country memories that probably would never happened with a 32-team tournament. Who are we to decide other small nations do not deserve the same opportunity just because their inclusion makes the fixture list untidier?

My suspicion remains that FIFA wants 64 teams primarily because 64 teams produce more matches, more sponsors and considerably more money. But a bad motive does not automatically make the outcome bad. I dislike the proposal, distrust the people proposing it and can see countless problems with it. Yet, I am not entirely convinced that making the World Cup more worldly is necessarily wrong.

Your say

“Yesterday’s game, result and performance just proves how useless Tuchel is under pressure. Given it was a pointless game but we won it with attractive, positive flair using our talents, although France were not very good.

“Now reading the press reports from players and coaches today, Sunday, it makes me fume! ‘Great team, blah blah, big effort, best England team for a long time.’

“Come on, we lost the semi-final unnecessarily because of the manager’s bad decisions and poor squad selection. He could have changed tactics and used his attacking players instead of his 10-men pathetic retreat.

“Finally on Tuchel, I still don’t get how he didn’t start Saka! He certainly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory! He is not up to the job, and his behaviour on the touch line is unprofessional and embarrassing – he should be sacked or resign immediately!” Malcolm C Benson, e-mail.

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