International Football
FIFA and the top domestic leagues are on a collision course after the global governing body’s president Gianni Infantino hit back at claims that FIFA is to blame for saturating the calendar with new events.
At a European Leagues meeting in London last month, Premier League boss Richard Masters rebuked FIFA for not consulting national leagues before expanding the annual, seven-team Club World Cup to a 32-team competition that will be played every four years, with the first edition scheduled to run from June 15 to July 13 in the United States next summer.
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Masters said the football calendar had reached a “tipping point” in terms of fixture congestion, with players telling their clubs they felt “overloaded”.
A week after those comments, the World Leagues Association (WLA), which Masters chairs, teamed up with players’ union FIFPro to demand FIFA moves the Club World Cup two weeks forward, reopens talks on player-release windows for international matches and scraps the old Club World Cup, which has been rebranded the Intercontinental Cup and will still be played every year.
Those demands came in an angry email to Infantino and FIFA’s general secretary Mattias Grafstrom which prompted an equally spiky response from Grafstrom a week later.
The email from the players and leagues accused FIFA of making unilateral decisions on the calendar that “benefit its own competitions and commercial interests” to the detriment of national competitions.
In his riposte, Grafstrom strongly rejected the claim that FIFA had failed to consult the relevant parties but invited FIFPro and WLA for talks on the calendar this summer.
That invitation, however, is unlikely to be enough to stop the players’ union and leagues from taking legal action — possibly in multiple national courts — against FIFA in the coming months. In fact, that looks almost certain after Infantino’s outburst.
Speaking at the 74th FIFA Congress in Bangkok on Friday, Infantino told delegates he wanted to respond to “critics” who have accused FIFA of “organising too many games”.
Having pointed out that most of the new events FIFA has created are in the women’s game, the Swiss-Italian said that even the after the new Club World Cup starts, FIFA will still only organise “around one percent of the games played by the top teams”.
FIFA said it is a similar story in terms of men’s international football, with FIFA responsible for less than two per cent of fixtures played by national sides, with the vast majority staged by the game’s six confederations.
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“But with these one to two per cent of matches, FIFA finances football all over the world,” said Infantino. “Our revenues aren’t just going to a few rich clubs but they go all over the world. No other organisation does that.
“So, I hope these figures show that we should stop this futile debate that’s really pointless.”
If Infantino really thinks this intervention will end the debate, he is likely to be disappointed, as the WLA, which represents 44 top leagues, including the Bundesliga, LaLiga and Serie A, is in no mood to back down on what it views as an existential threat to domestic football leagues.
It believes that the top players are going to be forced to take mini-breaks during never-ending seasons, in order to avoid injury and maintain their form. This, the leagues say, will inevitably damage the product they sell to broadcasters, match-going fans and sponsors.
For the leagues, the timing of the inaugural 32-team Club World Cup is the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it means participating players will not be able to get the four-week, off-season break that medical experts and players’ unions want before they are expected back in for pre-season training.
The solution, they believe, is obvious: move the new tournament forward so it finishes by the end of June. FIFA, however, has not wanted to give up the international window that sits at the start of June, which many nations use to schedule friendlies.
FIFPro, which is upset with FIFA for not agreeing to mandatory rest periods, and the WLA believe the recent European Court of Justice ruling on how FIFA and UEFA responded to the European Super League in 2021 has made it clear that governing bodies cannot just impose their will on others without taking steps to make sure their decisions are fair, transparent and proportionate.
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The WLA, in fact, has considered taking legal action against FIFA as a unified body but some of its members, including Mexico’s Liga MX, America’s MLS and the Saudi Pro League, voted against the idea. The majority of its members do want to take action, though, so a more individual approach is expected.
FIFA, on the other hand, will point out that the game benefits financially from having a coordinated calendar and the money it raises from its tournaments are ploughed back into development programmes around the globe.
(Top photo: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images)
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Based in North West England, Matt Slater is a senior football news reporter for The Athletic UK. Before that, he spent 16 years with the BBC and then three years as chief sports reporter for the UK/Ireland’s main news agency, PA. Follow Matt on Twitter @mjshrimper
