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.
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.
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.
