Latest news with #Infantino
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
The controversial reason Lionel Messi's Inter Miami are playing in the Club World Cup
There are 32 of the best football teams from across the globe playing in the Club World Cup over the coming weeks. The contest will see various clubs from all six confederations combining to produce Fifa's ultimate goal of crowning the champions of the world at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium. Advertisement Much of the tournament is made up from teams in Europe and South America, where the power of the club game has traditionally been. Watch every Fifa Club World Cup game free on DAZN. Sign up here now But clubs from Concacaf (North and Central America), AFC (Asia) and CAF (Africa) and OFC (Oceania) will hope to spring a surprise. Why are Inter Miami in the Club World Cup? The short answer is almost certainly 'Lionel Messi'. For more than a year, Fifa held open an unspecificied 'host country' slot in the competition, with no explanation for how it would be filled. Then Gianni Infantino turned up out of the blue at an MLS game in Miami to announce that Messi's Inter Miami had qualified for the Club World Cup via this mysterious additional slot due to their success in winning the regular-season league – something that wouldn't normally result in an additional prize, given the subsequent play-offs are where MLS champions are actually decided. Advertisement 'As one of the best clubs in the world, you are deserved participants in the new FIFA Club World Cup 2025,' Infantino announced. Fifa later explained in a statement that Inter Miami won the place 'on the basis of the club's outstanding and consistent 34-match campaign.' MLS chief Don Garber had initially approached Fifa with ideas for how to decide the spot, but has since hinted that Fifa took a unilateral decision over who earned the prize. Rival franchises were not happy, but Inter Miami co-owner Jorge Mas insisted there was "no controversy'. Yet it was undeniably an odd move by Fifa to choose the regular-season winners of MLS, considering other continents had very different entry requirements for qualification, such as the past continental champions four years ago – hello, Chelsea. But Infantino has the tournament he has long dreamed of, and he has the world's most famous player starring in it. Messi training at the Club World Cup this week (AP) How have teams qualified? Confederations were allocated a certain number of spots based on the strength of their teams. Advertisement Uefa (Europe) was given 12 spaces, Conmebol (South America) have six, Concacaf (North and Central America), AFC (Asia) and Caf (Africa) each have four spots, and OFC (Oceania) has one spot available. Concacaf were also given a fifth spot due to being the host nation of the tournament. These spots were decided through two methods: either winning a continental title in one of the four most recent seasons, or by being highly ranked in a system calculated by performances over the four qualifying years. In the majority of cases, teams have earned qualification through winning their confederation's equivalent of the Uefa Champions League. Advertisement For the OCF with only one team able to qualify, their spot went to the best performing team over the four years, which happened to be Auckland City. All countries were only allowed two teams to compete, except if all continental title winners came from the same nation. This is why there are four Brazilian teams who have won qualifying spots for CONMEBOL. Once the two-per-country cap had been reached, another team from that nation were not eligible to qualify, regardless of their ranking position. This rule has excluded teams such as Liverpool despite, being the eighth-ranked team, as Manchester City and Chelsea both received automatic qualification thanks to their Champions League victories in 2023 and 2021. Advertisement Other teams ineligible for qualification include Barcelona, RB Leipzig and Napoli, which gave lower ranked teams such as Benfica and FC Salzburg the opportunity to play. As Real Madrid won the Champions League twice within the four year timeframe (2022 and 2024), nine European teams gained qualification spots through ranking rather than the intended eight. The same goes for CAF. As their Champions League has been won by only two teams in the past four years, two teams ended up receiving qualification through ranking. Morocco's Wydad AC are in the tournament (AP) Qualification from the North and Central American confederation Concacaf is where things become complicated and controversial. Advertisement Mexican side, Club Leon were disqualified from the CWC due to multi-ownership regulations, despite gaining automatic qualification by winning the Champions Cup in 2023. Their shared ownership with Pachuca (who also qualified and are still permitted to compete) goes against Article 10 of Fifa, which forbids one individual or legal entity from controlling more than one club in the same tournament. As a result, after rejected appeals, Leon were disqualified. Fifa announced a play-off between Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) and Mexican team Club America which was won by LAFC, granting them access to the tournament. Messi is in the tournament (AP) Who has qualified and how did they get there? Uefa Manchester City - Auto - Champions League winners 2023 Advertisement Real Madrid - Auto - Champions League winners 2022, 2024 Chelsea - Auto - Champions League winners 2021 Bayern Munich - 3rd ranked PSG - 4th ranked Borussia Dortmund - 5th ranked Inter Milan - 7th ranked Porto - 9th ranked Athletico Madrid - 10th ranked Benfica - 13th ranked Juventus - 14th ranked FC Salzburg - 18th ranked Conmebol CR Flamengo - Auto - Copa Libertadores winners 2022 Palmeiras - Auto - Copa Libertadores winners 2021 Fluminense FC - Auto - Copa Libertadores winners 2023 Botafogo - Auto - Copa Libertadores winners 2024 CA River Plate - 4th ranked CA Broca Juniors - 6th ranked Concacaf CF Monterrey - Auto - Champions Cup winners 2021 Advertisement Pachuca - Auto - Champions Cup winners 2024 Seattle Sounders - Auto - Champions Cup winners 2022 Los Angeles - Play-off winners following Leon DQ Inter Miami - Supporters Shield winner 2024 AFC Al Hilal - Auto - AFC Champions League winners 2021 Uwara Red Diamonds - Auto AFC Champions League winners 2022 Al Ain - Auto - AFC Champions League winners 2024 Ulsan HD - 2nd ranked CAF Al Ahly - Auto - CAF Champions League winners 2021, 2023, 2024 Wydad AC - Auto - CAF Champions League winners 2022 Esperance de Tunisie - 3rd ranked Mamelodi Sundowns - 4th ranked OFC Auckland City - best performing team over four years You can sign up to DAZN to watch every Club World Cup game for free
Irish Examiner
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
America is showing us football in its final dictator form – we can't afford to look away
Should we give it a miss? Is it best to stay away from next summer's Trump-Infantino US World Cup? Depending on your politics the answer may be a resounding no or a bemused shrug. Some will see pure drive-by entertainment. Why would anyone want to boycott a month-long end-of-days Grand Soccer Parade staged by two of the world's most cinematic egomaniacs? But it is a question that has been asked, and will be asked a lot more in the next year. Those who intend to travel will need to answer it by action or omission. Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? The picture is at least clearer now. After a week of the new steroid-fed Club World Cup we know what this thing will feel like and who it will benefit. There is no mystery with these events now, no sense of politics lurking coyly out of sight. Under Gianni Infantino Fifa has become a kind of mobile propaganda agency for indulgent regimes, right out in front twirling its pompoms, hitching its leotard, twerking along at the front of the parade like an unholy Uncle Sam. So we had the grisly sight this week of Donald Trump not just borrowing football's light, but wrestling it on to his lap and ruffling its hair, burbling like a random hot-button word generator about women and trans people, while Juventus players gawped in the background. We have the spectacle of both club and international football hijacked as a personal vanity platform for Infantino, the dictator's fluffer, the man who sold the world not once but twice. Infantino's status as a wildly over-promoted administrator has always had an operatic quality. But there is something far more sinister in his political over-reach, out there nodding along at the latest Oval Office freak-off, helping to legitimise each divisive statement, each casual erasure of process. STAR POWER: Inter Miami's Lionel Messi reacts after scoring during the Club World Cup group A soccer match between Inter Miami and FC Porto in Atlanta, Thursday, June 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart) Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here it is acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. THE COMPANY YOU KEEP: President Donald Trump signs a FIFA soccer ball as Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and FIFA President Gianni Infantino looks on at the Lusail Palace, Wednesday, May 14, 2025, in Doha, Qatar, as they marked the passing of World Cup hosting duties from Qatar, which held it in 2022, to the United States, which is hosting in 2026. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? BUYING IN: Flamengo's Wallace Yan celebrates after scoring during the Club World Cup Group D soccer match between Flamengo and Chelsea in Philadelphia, Friday, June 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton) A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good. The Guardian
The Guardian
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
America is showing us football in its final dictator form – we can't afford to look away
Should we give it a miss? Is it best to stay away from next summer's Trump-Infantino US World Cup? Depending on your politics the answer may be a resounding no or a bemused shrug. Some will see pure drive-by entertainment. Why would anyone want to boycott a month-long end-of-days Grand Soccer Parade staged by two of the world's most cinematic egomaniacs? But it is a question that has been asked, and will be asked a lot more in the next year. Those who intend to travel will need to answer it by action or omission. Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? The picture is at least clearer now. After a week of the new steroid-fed Club World Cup we know what this thing will feel like and who it will benefit. There is no mystery with these events now, no sense of politics lurking coyly out of sight. Under Gianni Infantino Fifa has become a kind of mobile propaganda agency for indulgent regimes, right out in front twirling its pompoms, hitching its leotard, twerking along at the front of the parade like an unholy Uncle Sam. So we had the grisly sight this week of Donald Trump not just borrowing football's light, but wrestling it on to his lap and ruffling its hair, burbling like a random hot-button word generator about women and trans people, while Juventus players gawped in the background. We have the spectacle of both club and international football hijacked as a personal vanity platform for Infantino, the dictator's fluffer, the man who sold the world not once but twice. Infantino's status as a wildly over-promoted administrator has always had an operatic quality. But there is something far more sinister in his political over-reach, out there nodding along at the latest Oval Office freak-off, helping to legitimise each divisive statement, each casual erasure of process. Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here is it acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good.
Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Juventus players befuddled by visit with Trump at White House: 'I just want to play football, man'
President Trump speaks to the press June 18 in the Oval Office of the White House as members of Italian soccer club Juventus (from left, Timothy Weah, Weston McKennie, Daniele Rugani, coach Igor Tudor and Dusan Vlahovics) stand behind him. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images) Members of the Italian soccer team Juventus visited with President Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon. Exactly why the gathering took place remains largely a mystery. Six of the team's players (Weston McKennie, Timothy Weah, Manuel Locatelli, Federico Gatti, Teun Koopmeiners and Dusan Vlahovic), their coach Igor Tudor, a handful of team executives and FIFA president Gianni Infantino stopped by hours before Juventus' FIFA Club World Cup game against United Arab Emirates' Al Ain that night at Audi Field. Advertisement Trump was presented with a Juventus jersey and one for next year's World Cup, which the United States will be co-host with Canada and Mexico. But as Trump took questions from the media for about 15 minutes during the event, very little soccer was discussed. Instead, the players stood behind him patiently — fidgeting now and then, their faces mainly expressionless — as Trump answered questions that mostly related to the potential of U.S. involvement in Israel's war against Iran. Later that night, speaking to a different group of reporters after his team's 5-0 victory over Al Ain, Weah called the White House experience "a bit weird" and implied he and the other players weren't given the option of declining the visit. Read more: Hiltzik: How Trump could sabotage L.A.'s World Cup and Olympics Advertisement 'They told us that we have to go and I had no choice but to go," said Weah, a U.S. men's national team member whose father George is a past winner of the prestigious France Football Ballon d'Or award and was the president of Liberia from 2018-2024. "So [I] showed up.' FIFA declined to comment. The White House and Juventus did not respond to requests for comment from The Times. While Weah said he thought his first White House visit "was a cool experience," he added that 'I'm not one for the politics, so it wasn't that exciting.' 'When [Trump] started talking about all the politics with Iran and everything, it's kind of like, I just want to play football, man,' Weah said. Advertisement Fellow USMNT player McKennie had made critical comments about Trump during the Black Lives Matter movement in June 2020. Juventus players Weston McKennie, left, and Tim Weah take a selfie outside the White House after they and other team members met with President Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) 'I don't think that Trump is the right one for the job as the president," McKennie said at the time. "I think he's ignorant. I don't support him a bit. I don't think he's a man to stand by his word. In my eyes, you can call him racist.' Still, during his introductory comments, Trump briefly singled out Weah and McKennie as "my American players" when he mentioned that night's game. "Good luck," he said while shaking both of their hands in what had the potential to be an awkward moment. "I hope you guys are the two best players on the field." Advertisement Read more: Hernández: Dodgers visiting Trump's White House goes against everything they represent That's not to say, however, that there weren't any awkward moments. Because there were — none more so than when Trump brought up "men playing in women's sports," then looked over his right shoulder and asked: "Could a woman make your team, fellas? Tell me. You think?" When no players answered, Trump said, "You're being nice," then turned to face the other direction and asked the same question. 'We have a very good women's team,' Juventus general manager Damien Comolli replied. Advertisement Trump asked, "But they should be playing with women, right?" When he got no response, Trump smiled and turned back toward the reporters. Read more: With FIFA World Cup one year away, fans and politicians still aren't sure what to expect "See, they're very diplomatic," he said. Trump made a couple of other attempts to involve the soccer contingent in the discussion. At one point, the president used the word "stealth" when discussing U.S. military planes, then turned around and remarked, "You guys want to be stealthy tonight. You can be stealthy — you'll never lose, right?" Advertisement The players did not seem to respond. For the final question of the session, a reporter favorably compared Trump's border policy to that of former President Biden and asked, "What do you attribute that success to?" Trump looked behind him and stated, "See, that's what I call a good question, fellas." Once again, the players did not appear to respond. Read more: FIFA Club World Cup: Everything you need to know about all 32 teams Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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Business Standard
18-06-2025
- Sport
- Business Standard
FIFA Club World Cup 2025 begins, but why is it flying under the radar?
The 2025 FIFA Club World Cup opened with a burst of glamour as Lionel Messi took center stage at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. The Argentine superstar led Inter Miami in a goalless draw against Egypt's Al Ahly, drawing a massive crowd despite failing to find the back of the net. Watching from the VIP stands were football legends David Beckham, Ronaldo Nazário, Roberto Baggio, Kaka, Bebeto, and Javier Zanetti, adding star power to the tournament's launch. Despite the lack of goals, fans turned out in large numbers, eager to see Messi in action on home soil. FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who has championed the expanded Club World Cup as a legacy project, was also in attendance and looked pleased with the tournament's kickoff. Infantino's Ambitious Vision Infantino's strategy to boost the Club World Cup's stature includes allowing MLS champions Inter Miami a special entry as host nation representatives, a reported invitation to Cristiano Ronaldo, and raising the winner's prize money by $35 million. He called the event 'the beginning of a new chapter' in global football. Yet, just three days in, the competition has yet to match its lofty billing. While top clubs have shown flashes of brilliance, several issues have begun to surface. Heat and Scheduling Draw Criticism Player welfare has been a growing concern, with mid-day matches scheduled under extreme heat. During the PSG vs Atletico Madrid clash in Pasadena, temperatures soared to 31°C (88°F). Coaches and players noted the weather's impact on gameplay. FIFA has implemented cooling breaks and additional substitutions, but players' unions like FIFPRO have criticized the tournament's timing, citing increased risks of injury and mental burnout following a long season. Mismatched Contests Raise Eyebrows Sunday saw Bayern Munich dismantle Auckland City 10-0, highlighting the disparity between elite European teams and clubs from smaller federations. Auckland, made up largely of semi-professionals, struggled against a full-strength Bayern side. More one-sided encounters are anticipated as teams like Benfica and Boca Juniors face similarly lower-ranked opponents. While opening matches featuring Messi and PSG attracted huge crowds, other games painted a different picture. Chelsea's fixture against LAFC in Atlanta had only 22,000 fans in a 75,000-seat stadium. Flamengo's match in Philadelphia saw a turnout below 40%, and Seattle's game drew similar numbers. Although FIFA announced that over 1.5 million tickets have been sold and fans from 130 countries are attending, the lower-than-expected attendance for some matches hints at the challenges of sustaining momentum throughout the tournament.
