FIFA in Checkmate (thanks to mate’s cheques)

I wrote some months back that the forthcoming World Cup in Brazil will be the last in its current form. The revelations in the Sunday Times this weekend do nothing to change it.

Essentially, FIFA are already in checkmate.

The leak can really only have come from within FIFA, underscoring that they really, really want and need to take the World Cup away from Qatar for all the obvious reasons.

But they’re stymied. There’s some contractual issues which mean Qatar can sue back. There’s the political fallout from the Gulf states who see this as their World Cup, and they’ve been funding quite a bit of football around the world, not least at national level. They’d have the animus and resources to want to cut FIFA’s legs off from under it.

But if they stick with Qatar, they antagonise everyone in the major moneyed leagues, UEFA, other sports and TV companies, international labour groups to name but a few. They’d also have the animus and the resources to want to cut FIFA’s legs off from under it.

Everywhere you look, there are people suffering loss, and as behavioural economics has shown, people act differently and more decisively to avert loss than to seek gain.

In other words, whilst we’ve known for years that you might reorder global football in new ways that enable certain actors to profit more, it’s been hard to see why they would risk an uncertain future versus an annoying and inconvenient present.

But with Qatar, everything changes. It’s about a certain future of pain and loss, or a chance of less pain if you do something.

It’s hard to see how this doesn’t end with a fundamental breakaway; even if they avoid it in the first instance, someone, somewhere is going to sue. And that suit will bring more information in the public domain which will further tarnish the brand and the competition and create space for something new.

And what might that be?

UEFA’s new format for the Euros looks far more interesting — less reliant on the mega-event infrastructure (and hassle and graft), it’s a series of matches played in different cities in a similar time period. It’s really easy to expand it to teams outside Europe, and host matches outside Europe. It’s a clever hedge.

Sitting behind it is the bigger issue about whether international football has a future. Maybe the next World Cup will surprise us, but it’s likely for entirely predictable and structural reasons to be more like the last World Cup that Mexico 70, or Spain 82.

All the while the clubs will be thinking through their own challenges, not least of which are the next generation of fans who have been schooled in EA Sports FIFA and Pro-Evolution soccer, and for whom teams seem as much a weird hangover in the age of the star as national football does in an age of super-clubs.

In essence, we’re moving through the studio system into the modern movie age. The days when a studio had the talent, and in order to be a star,you first needed to made into one by the studio, are gone. A film gets made on the basis of the talent; George Clooney brings his George Clooney brand (and fans) to your script and production as much as he gets to act in your amazing script.

I wrote an article a decade ago about shirt numbers, and how they signified a transition from clubs to players; nothing has happened since to do anything but accelerate the trend. And denouement in FIFA won’t happen without reflecting these new fundamental economic and cultural aspects of the game.