Gianni Infantino has won
Behind him, Tom Brady appeared to compliment one of the boat's captains on the catch he made. Hilfiger didn't get wet, in the end, and after making light of his near-fall, took his seat in the vaporetto for the ride to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's wedding on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
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As an event, the only thing that attracted nearly the same opprobrium this summer was the Club World Cup.
Brady was in attendance for that, too, amid a similar crowd of powerful and influential VIPs to see another show of excess, not to mention a Hilfiger-like slip by Paris Saint-Germain, who were still relatively unblemished by their 3-0 defeat by Chelsea having won the Champions League only six weeks ago. Sunday's final, in many respects, resembled a rite of extravagant matrimony. It started (eight minutes) late.
The acts were prestigious but dated (more for the parents and their illustrious friends than the real players), and there were some Tiffany rings at the end of it.
The issues with the Club World Cup were similar to those experienced by Venice during the Bezos wedding and in general. There is no off-season. Every day on the calendar has a red ring around it. It is more and more crowded. Its foundations are subsiding. Climate change is causing disruption. It is ever more expensive. A cornetto and a cappuccino on St Mark's Square costs double figures — inflated, as in other cities, by mass tourism and the post-Covid resurgence in travel.
The 'No Space for Bezos' and 'Tourist Go Home' protests evoke a sentiment familiar to football watchers. Think of the locals as legacy fans seeking to protect tradition, and the tourists as sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East and American private equity firms gracelessly trampling over it, pronouncing bruschetta 'bru-she-tta'.
The island of San Giorgio Maggiore is, as the art critic Jacopo Veneziani recalled during the Bezos nuptials, where Paolo Veronese painted The Wedding Feast at Cana, a work Napoleon had cut into seven pieces and carted off for exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. Its positioning, opposite Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, means that, irrespective of its status as the museum's largest painting, it is arguably the most ignored masterpiece in the world.
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Some thought it an apt metaphor for the Bezos wedding — that it wasn't worth paying attention to. The same was said of the Club World Cup.
And yet the show went on, even amid the threat of inflatable alligators being strewn across the lagoon to stop guests from reaching the original wedding venue. The bride and groom smiled on their big day just as FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump did at MetLife, regardless of the boos from sections of the crowd. It was pure Honey Badger. They didn't care. No one was going to spoil it for them — and that has been their attitude throughout.
You don't have to salute Infantino for pulling off the Club World Cup, but it wasn't cancelled. Nor did it fail.
When FIFA first tried to do something similar in Brazil in 2000, launching an eight-team tournament that Manchester United sacrilegiously abandoned the FA Cup to participate in, a repeat never happened because ISL, FIFA's marketing partner, collapsed. They went back to playing the Intercontinental Trophy instead. Organising competitions like this isn't easy.
When the FIFA Council voted for a revamped 24-team Club World Cup in 2019 (21 were in favour, nine against), Covid-19 got in the way of a 2021 pilot edition. It was then announced at the end of the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 that the Club World Cup would go ahead anyway in 2025 and the tournament would be even bigger, featuring 32 teams in total.
It looked, again, like Infantino had bitten off more than he could chew.
This time last year, Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti told Il Giornale: 'FIFA can forget it. The players and clubs won't participate in that tournament. A single Real Madrid game is worth €20million (£17.4m; $23.3m), and FIFA wants to give us that amount for the entire cup. No way.'
Within hours, Madrid issued a statement of denial, saying that 'at no point… has its participation been in doubt'.
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The reporter in question, who has known Ancelotti since his time at Milan, stood by the interview and insisted his words had been accurately reported.
Around the same time, the players' union, FIFPro, in Europe announced it had submitted a legal claim against FIFA 'challenging the legality of FIFA's decision to unilaterally set the International Match Calendar and, in particular, the decision to create and schedule the FIFA Club World Cup'.
Then there were the issues of confirming venues and finding a global broadcast partner, which only happened in the winter when SURJ Sports Investment, an investment vehicle from 2034 World Cup hosts Saudi Arabia, bought a 10 per cent stake in the platform DAZN for $1bn — a figure that just so happened to be the prize money to bring the big clubs fully on board.
A Club World Cup in doubt went ahead, nonetheless, and while the perception of it as a vanity project remain — a kind of Infantino Bowl or Copa Gianni — it wasn't rescheduled again, it wasn't cancelled. For better or worse, it did happen and Infantino emerged from it emboldened and perhaps further empowered.
This son of a railwayman from Brig, Switzerland, has Trump's ear more than many of the world's most high-profile political leaders and the Club World Cup appears to have been designed to appeal to his sensibilities.
The symbolism of this Club World Cup — gold and gaudy — is Trumpian. The language he has used, calling the 32 teams at the tournament the best in the world when everyone knows that not to be the case, is Trumpian. The replica of the trophy and the medal he gifted Trump were cringingly ingratiating, but hardly any different in statecraft from what the UK prime minister Keir Starmer did in presenting Trump with a letter from the King inviting him to a second state visit later this year.
None of this guaranteed Trump would show up for the final. POTUS is a busy guy. During the Club World Cup alone, he has sent the National Guard into Los Angeles, held a military parade on his birthday — an event that clashed with the opening game between Inter Miami and Al Ahly — fallen out spectacularly with Elon Musk, bombed Iran and passed his Big Beautiful Bill.
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In other words, finding time for the party Infantino was throwing was by no means a given.
And yet Trump not only attended, but he endorsed and participated in a way that not only eclipsed the other sporting events of the day, such as the men's Wimbledon final, but almost all other news stories. Anyone who hadn't heard of the Club World Cup or had wilfully avoided it, couldn't disregard it anymore.
For those quick to dismiss the competition, don't doubt its potential as a tectonic moment in the history of football.
At Trump Tower in New York the day before the final, Infantino, in one of his rare media engagements, gave a speech in which he made claims that served as proof, to him, that his doubters were wrong: 2.5m spectators, average crowds of 40,000, revenues worth $2.1bn — which, Carlo, meant every match was worth $33m.
Behind Infantino were his best men, a collection of legends and Ballon d'Or winners; football men, there to give him credibility. Earlier in the tournament, Madrid president Florentino Perez had backed him, too, telling DAZN: 'We have finally achieved something we have been fighting for for a long time.'
A new competition. A new revenue driver. The closest thing to a Super League — only under the FIFA umbrella, one not limited to Europe, one that brings in the team Perez's Madrid were facing that day, Al Hilal; the Saudis.
Chelsea, whose fans memorably protested the Super League, kind of came full circle in celebrating the conquest of a Super League in Club World Cup clothing; that's a FIFA jacket and white shoes. This must have been uncomfortable viewing for UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, who conspicuously stayed away and has taken to calling the Club World Cup 'the so-called Club World Cup'. He appears to have been outflanked by Infantino.
If this becomes a once-every-two-year tournament rather than a once-every-four-year one, UEFA have a problem because the Club World Cup will create useful confusion among the new generation of football fans who will begin to wonder with each new edition: What's the more prestigious competition?
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A winner from arguably the most sceptical market, England, is probably helpful too because the Club World Cup and what lifting it really means is now going to be part of the conversation in the Premier League for years to come.
As Bezos bobbed around Venice on a motorboat, he surveyed his surroundings and observed: 'It's an impossible city. It can't exist, and yet here it is.'
The same could have been said of the Club World Cup. Nothing, in the end, could stop it. Standing on the side of the canal, waving a fist at it isn't enough. It's too late.
The vaporetto has sailed.
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