FIFA - ready to undermine the PL... | Vital Football

FIFA - ready to undermine the PL...

Spursex

Spursex

Alert Team
Premier League fears Fifa Club World Cup expansion would be Super League by the back door

Exclusive: English clubs suspect 32-team competition will reward established elite and will erode domestic broadcast revenue



By Sam Wallace, Chief Football Writer 31 March 2023 • 10:14pm


Premier League clubs have discussed their fears that the new format for the Fifa Club World Cup (FCWC), which expands to become a 32-team tournament in 2025, could become a “European Super League by the back door”.
Fifa agreed plans for the new competition at its congress in Rwanda this March, and although the governing body has announced 12 Uefa qualification places in the competition, it has not said definitively how those places might be earned. At the Premier League shareholders’ meeting on Thursday in London, clubs asked for the details on FCWC qualification in Europe.
Thus far Fifa has said that it will be the four Champions League winners in the four years leading up to 2025 – with Chelsea and Real Madrid already assured of a place – and then the top eight-ranked clubs excluding those already qualified. There will be a cap of two clubs per country unless that country has more than two Champions League winners in the four-year period.
The question will be how exactly Uefa ranks the additional clubs. Either way, the feeling among Premier League clubs is that the system will reward the big clubs who are already perennial Champions League participants and make it through into the knockout rounds each season, thus deepening the financial divide between the elite and the rest.




The FCWC expansion cleared its final hurdle when the powerful European Club Association (ECA) signed a memorandum of understanding with Fifa over the future world football calendar on Monday. But there are clubs outside the big six in the Premier League who fear that the ECA does not represent their concerns.

A significant fear is that Fifa’s incursion into the club game will see it chasing the broadcast revenue that would otherwise be earned by domestic leagues, and in particular the Premier League. Additional earnings for clubs playing in the FCWC, as well as the expanded Uefa Champions League, which will grow from six group games to 10 in 2024, will make the biggest and the wealthiest even wealthier than domestic rivals who do not play in Uefa and Fifa competitions.

There is a strong belief that the appetite for broadcasters to pay for live rights is finite and more international club competitions will simply chip value away from domestic league rights. The biggest clubs in Europe could eventually come to earn more from Fifa and Uefa competitions than they do from domestic league and cups.

Fifa has been looking at ways of earning greater revenue outside of its quadrennial World Cup finals. It first proposed a biennial World Cup finals with Arsène Wenger as the front man, a project that was widely regarded to be a stalking horse for the new expanded FCWC. That was abandoned by Fifa president Gianni Infantino once he had enough support for an expanded FCWC. The battle to control the calendar of word football is fundamental to controlling its wealth.

Fifa was emboldened to pursue plans for the FCWC by the advocate-general advice to the European Court of Justice in December, in the Super League case pursued by the three remaining rebel clubs. Fifa’s interpretation of that ruling was that it had jurisdiction to set up the competition. In its agreement with the ECA it is expected that the two organisations will establish a joint venture to control the revenue of the new FCWC.

The body representing domestic leagues around the world, and chaired by Premier League chief executive Richard Masters, has described the FCWC expansion as having “damaging consequences for the football economy and player welfare”. The World Leagues Forum said Fifa announced the proposals without consultation. The Uefa Congress takes place in Lisbon this week.
 

Gianni Infantino has stepped up the Fifa power grab and all Uefa can do is watch​


Taking the World Cup to Saudi Arabia buys Infantino an ally with deep pockets as he eyes repositioning Fifa at the global game's centre


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2023/10/31/fifa-gianni-infantino-world-cup-2034-saudi-arabia/

Sam Wallace
Chief Football Writer
31 October 2023 • 8:12pm
Infantino is aiming to tap into the lucrative media rights market of club football
The lines have been drawn for the battle over football’s future calendar and its wealth: Fifa vs Uefa, with Fifa president Gianni Infantino now firmly allied with Saudi Arabia as the partner who can fund his attempt to challenge for the broadcast riches of the elite club game.
Fifa announced that Saudi will bid unopposed for the 2034 World Cup finals next October, an outcome that shows the new direction of Infantino’s strategy, less than 12 months since the start of Qatar 2022. Many feel he is a more powerful Fifa president than Sepp Blatter, and with bigger ambitions. Infantino’s designs on the club game – via the expanded Fifa Club World Cup – seek to challenge the old order of world football.
Infantino wants to break into the lucrative media rights market for club football, currently dominated by Uefa and its Champions League – and the Premier League. He seeks to do so with the newly expanded 32-team Fifa Club World Cup which launches in that format in 2025. To fund that he needs a wealthy ally like Saudi, for whom the prestige of hosting a World Cup – as its tiny neighbour Qatar did to such great effect – is the deal that Infantino can deliver.


Advertisement : 12 sec

As a former Uefa general secretary, Infantino is well aware of Uefa’s power. Unlike Fifa it is an annual presence in the lives of fans – with its flagship Champions League’s media rights set to rise to as much as €4.5 billion (£3.92 billion) per season. With the men’s European Championships and Nations League – the three profitable competitions Uefa runs – its revenue over a four-year period of around €21 billion (£18.3 billion) far exceeds the €8 billion (£6.97 billion) the men’s World Cup finals generates once every four years.
Defeated on the campaign for a biennial World Cup finals, Infantino wants to generate revenue through more Fifa club football. In the fallout from the European Super League rebellion and the scramble to divide up the match calendar post 2024, Fifa landed a much bigger summer Club World Cup. Next month’s Club World Cup will be the last on the old seven-team format, and held – as a sign of things to come – in Jeddah.




The Fifa 2015 scandal ushered in what Infantino likes to call “New Fifa”. Instead of 22 men voting in private for the host of the biggest sporting event in the world, World Cups are now decided on a one nation, one vote basis by the 211 member nations.
Yet Infantino has not only introduced one vote per country - he has also engineered one-horse bidding races. For 2030 there will be no opposition to the triple-continental confederation bid of Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. The withdrawal of Australia from the 2034 process on Monday meant that there will be no opposition to Saudi.
Advertisement



New Fifa may be a 211-vote democracy, but when national associations cast their votes at the Fifa congress in one year’s time there will only be a single candidate on the ballot paper.
How has he done it? Confederations now largely deliver their votes in what Fifa insiders describe as “megablocks”. Infantino has built his alliances accordingly. He has Concacaf - North and Central America - which wields 41 votes. He has Africa, the CAF federation, which has 54 votes. So too the Asian Football Confederation with 47 votes.
Fifa’s influence in CAF is so great that it effectively took over the running of the confederation in 2019. Infantino dispatched his general secretary Fatma Soumara as a “high commissioner” to clean up CAF and subsequent leaderships have been loyal to Infantino. A handful of African national associations even endorsed the Saudi bid within hours of it being announced. The AFC backed Saudi over Australia, another AFC member, with similar haste.
It means that Infantino can do without courting Uefa and its 55 votes. He knows that Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin sees Fifa as a direct threat to its pre-eminence in the club competitions. South America’s Conmebol has had alliances with Uefa and Fifa at different times. But then for all Conmebol’s members’ history and prestige it only has ten votes.
Infantino delivered Saudi a World Cup finals in the space of a month – from the surprise announcement on Oct 5 that all submissions of interest had to be made by Oct 31, through to Australia’s inevitable withdrawal this week. Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup finals first became serious around 2007 and the controversy lasted another 15 years, through the 2010 vote, the subsequent revelations of corruption, right up to the tournament itself. Saudi 2034 looks simple by comparison.


The new Fifa works well for Infantino. Power flows up through three key confederations. The Fifa president can bypass dissenting voices like those in Uefa. The chairs of the English and the German football associations sit on the Fifa Council although what that means in terms of power is very little. They are the old world of football and divided over Infantino.
As for the big promises Infantino made last November in Doha – those have not been realised quite as swiftly as the way has been cleared for Saudi 2034. Infantino pledged a review of the impact on human rights in Qatar. Fifa says it has established a “sub-committee” to decide whether workers’ “access to remedy” complies with Fifa’s “responsibilities under relevant international standards”. Fifa says that review is “ongoing”.
A more cynical observer would say that in the 11 months that have passed, Fifa has found the time effectively to decide on the host of two World Cup finals. The second of which is 11 years away.
Equally, no review has yet been published – as Infantino promised – into the effect of a winter World Cup finals on domestic leagues and associations. Saudi 2034 will, of course, most likely be another winter World Cup with all the three-year disruption that encompasses. That part of the calendar has been promised to Saudi by Fifa in return for a partnership that the latter hopes might one day make it a major player in the club game as well. The rest of the game, Fifa hopes, will just fall into line.
 

www.thetimes.co.uk

My Abramovich warning was ignored – same cannot happen with Saudi

Saudi Arabia’s sporting land grab will invite scrutiny only briefly before regime’s atrocities are ignored amid the star power of top athletes
www.thetimes.co.uk www.thetimes.co.uk

​

My Abramovich warning was ignored – same cannot happen with Saudi​


new

Saudi Arabia’s sporting land grab will invite scrutiny only briefly before regime’s atrocities are ignored amid the star power of top athletes​

Matthew Syed

Wednesday November 01 2023, 5.00pm, The Times

Don’t worry, they said. Roman Abramovich is making a terrible mistake, they said. By purchasing Chelsea, he will invite scrutiny on the way he amassed his fortune. People will wake up to how he worked in cahoots with corrupt politicians to plunder the wealth of the Russian people. Indeed, the purchase will shine a light on the wider scandal of the “London Laundromat”; the way that a coterie of oligarchs loyal to Vladimir Putin were recycling cash in Mayfair and putting their children through prestigious British schools.

How did that work out, then? Twenty years on, we can see this thesis for what it was: delusional. Just as Abramovich hoped, his ownership of Chelsea invited scrutiny for about ten minutes ― perhaps 20 if you count a couple of rather flimsy TV documentaries. Other than that, we had silence, tumbleweed blowing across the vista, compliant football journalists conveniently forgetting the geopolitical context (if they had ever understood it) and praising his “love” of the club, his “true blue” instincts and the way he had ― as some of the more egregious put it ― “saved” English football.


Even the pundits on Match of the Day became the de facto stooges of this ruthless oligarch, joking about his lovely grin and the way he jumped up and down when Chelsea scored. Meanwhile, Abramovich’s presence in the heart of British society offered the greenest of green lights to Putin and his cronies to steal more cash from the Russian people, confident that it could safely re-emerge in London. This is the real story of what unfolded, the way dozens of credulous people became pawns, which left Ukraine fatally exposed when Putin finally made the move that many of us had been warning. It was a violation of our national interest and a betrayal of our values.


And this, let me warn, is what is unfolding in the case of Saudi Arabia. You may have noticed the Gulf state is in the midst of the most audacious land grab in the history of sport. A few months ago the PGA Tour announced a deal with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund to jointly run golf. It was described as a “merger” and other euphemisms. I hope most grown-ups who witnessed the hypocrisy of Jay Monahan ― the commissioner of the PGA Tour, who now answers to Yasir al-Rumayyan, golf’s new chief ― will discern the truth. An autocratic petrostate now owns the game and its coterie of star players.
But this is merely one pixel in a rapidly shifting picture. Boxing stars, Formula One drivers and football icons are plying their trade in the Gulf while the regime owns an ever-broadening set of sports assets around the world. On Tuesday, we heard the latest announcement when it was confirmed that Saudi Arabia is the sole candidate to host the 2034 World Cup after an “impossibly tight deadline” was imposed by Fifa. Martyn Ziegler detailed how Fifa had “laid down the red carpet” for the Saudi regime, describing the “cosy” relationship between the two ― a telling euphemism.

​


Yet what strikes me most about this story is that there are still people out there who cannot see what’s happening. They tell us that this gambit can’t work for Saudi Arabia. They say that staging sports competitions will invite scrutiny of their human rights violations, the chainsawing and dismembering of a journalist, the spate of mass executions. They say that the presence of top athletes will remind people that the Saudi regime is still funding the Yemeni civil war, has embraced Bashar al-Assad’s narco-state of Syria via the Arab League and rebuffed the West (and helped Putin) by violating oil price undertakings.
Permit me to present a different prediction. Yes, negative stories will circulate for a few weeks, perhaps months. But then, with time-tested inevitability, they will melt away. Saudi Arabia and sport will become interwoven in the public mind; tournaments will unfold without anyone batting an eyelid; people will start to talk about how the Saudis “really” love football, golf, etc. The stellar performances of Cristiano Ronaldo and Rory McIlroy will bring associational kudos to the people funding them and the pay cheques will turn these players ― unconsciously ― into mouthpieces for the regime, just as Chelsea players became mouthpieces for Abramovich. By the end, the Saudi rulers will become so thoroughly doused in the stardust of top athletes that people will forget about their contempt for the rule of law and vicious absolutism.


This is how sportswashing works; how it has always worked. It is why Putin hosted the Winter Olympics and World Cup, why Beijing spent billions to gain the 2008 Summer Games and why the Qataris paid huge bribes to secure the 2022 World Cup jamboree. It is why Hitler was so quick to stage the 1936 Games in Berlin, an event that offered a huge propaganda boost despite the success of Jesse Owens. The sheer joy of sport, the talent of its greatest players, the frisson it sends through hearts and minds: all make it ripe for exploitation by those who wish to deflect, distract and obfuscate their real agendas. And, let me reiterate, it is chillingly effective.
It is stunning to remember that at the high point of Chelsea’s success, Bruce Buck, the former Chelsea chairman and a shameless stooge for Abramovich, wrote a column for a national newspaper. By this stage, the reputation of the oligarch was so thoroughly laundered that instead of merely positioning him as a kindly businessman, Buck sought to present him as a latter-day Mother Teresa. He wrote of Abramovich’s “passion for the game” and how Chelsea “engage in hundreds of community activities at home and abroad”.

​



And guess what: people fell for it. I am not just talking about Chelsea fans, many of whom disgracefully continue to chant Abramovich’s name (blind loyalty in club football makes it particularly conducive to sportswashing); I am talking about wider society too. There were even rumours that a man who triumphed in the bloody aluminium wars might be in line for an honorary knighthood. This, friends, is how the purchase of trophy assets enables foreign actors to penetrate the soft underbelly of our establishment. See also: Evgeny Lebedev, the newspaper owner who was made a peer in 2020.

Putin used the 2014 Sochi Games to distract from his real agendas — that is how sportswashing works

But perhaps I may conclude with this: I regard it as a privilege to live in the UK, a nation where people have a right to choose where they work (just as others have a right to criticise them). This is true for golfers throwing their lot in with the Saudis, just as it is for boxers, footballers, F1 drivers, oil rig workers and businesspeople. And while I’d love to see football select a venue other than Saudi Arabia for 2034, I am realistic enough to see that the governing bodies are hopelessly corrupt ― and have been for decades.
No, the key lesson here is for the government and the public. We have to wake up to how sport is being leveraged not as a conventional form of trade but as a mechanism of reputation laundering. For if we remain asleep, we will continue to be manipulated by regimes that are hostile to our values and will ― when it comes to the crunch ― betray our interests. This is what happened with the oligarchs, with Russia and, on the margins, with China too. The Saudis are counting on it happening again.
 
Like I’ve been saying for a long time , mainly about Wokism , but now the future of our beautiful game , I’m glad I’m in the departure lounge rather than the arrivals hall.

Just one question ….. what are FIFA and UEFA going to do with all this money ?
 
TQ2Spurs said:
I've seen reports that suggest Newcastle are interested in loaning players that recently moved to Saudi, Neves being one of them, it's all starting to look dodgy to me!
Click to expand...


In the short term the players won't develop there well. But they will get playing time.

It's interesting that Ronaldo went to Saudi and Messi went to America.
 
80deg16minW said:
In the short term the players won't develop there well. But they will get playing time.

It's interesting that Ronaldo went to Saudi and Messi went to America.
Click to expand...
I'm more concerned about the possibility of FFP rules being flouted by Saudi money buying up players then loaning them to clubs they also own in europe as a way of dodging the sustainability requirements.
 
TQ2Spurs said:
I'm more concerned about the possibility of FFP rules being flouted by Saudi money buying up players then loaning them to clubs they also own in europe as a way of dodging the sustainability requirements.
Click to expand...

FFP is an UEFA regulatory requirement. Not a FIFA requirement. So it doesn't apply.
 
TBF UEFA's dominance in World football just pisses everyone else off. Moreso than the PL. UEFA's dominance is completely undermined by FIFA's one country one vote structure.

Everyone wants to be the PL. So the PL is seen as competition. If the EU steps in to protect UEFA all hell will break loose globally and UEFA will suffer.

That's why I don't think UEFA's Swiss model will save them from the Super League. The Super League will need to cross more borders including Saudi/Middle East and the USA. Sooner or later that will include Asia.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
80deg16minW said:
TBF UEFA's dominance in World football just pisses everyone else off. Moreso than the PL. UEFA's dominance is completely undermined by FIFA's one country one vote structure.

Everyone wants to be the PL. So the PL is seen as competition. If the EU steps in to protect UEFA all hell will break loose globally and UEFA will suffer.

That's why I don't think UEFA's Swiss model will save them from the Super League. The Super League will need to cross more borders including Saudi/Middle East and the USA. Sooner or later that will include Asia.
Click to expand...

Everything UEFA/FIFA is doing recently will just speed up a breakaway from them, people are already sick of FIFA and the rubbish they come up with, giving the World Cup to Saudi could be the final straw for many.

There is about 30 clubs world wide that hold the power now, the WCC is a way to appease them, it won't work.
 
Sockspurs said:
Everything UEFA/FIFA is doing recently will just speed up a breakaway from them, people are already sick of FIFA and the rubbish they come up with, giving the World Cup to Saudi could be the final straw for many.

There is about 30 clubs world wide that hold the power now, the WCC is a way to appease them, it won't work.
Click to expand...


You need to separate FIFA from UEFA.

The prevailing powerhouses do not like either as they threaten the prevailing powerhouses' power base.
 
80deg16minW said:
FFP is an UEFA regulatory requirement. Not a FIFA requirement. So it doesn't apply.
Click to expand...
It doesn't apply in Saudi but if they have players which they then loan to european clubs in order to get round FFP regulations that apply to them then it's not going to be within the spirit of those regulations at best and a deliberate middle finger gesture at worst.
 
TQ2Spurs said:
It doesn't apply in Saudi but if they have players which they then loan to european clubs in order to get round FFP regulations that apply to them then it's not going to be within the spirit of those regulations at best and a deliberate middle finger gesture at worst.
Click to expand...

I get that. It doesn't apply outside of Europe. And there is a big world out there that doesn't give a shit about European attempts at football hegemony. But there is nothing that can be done about it as FIFA has not adopted the FFP framework.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.