Speaking at the opening of the Asian Football Confederation's new headquarters the other day, FIFA president Gianni Infantino reiterated plans to
expand the Club World Cup. He said he wants to make it a "real competition" that "every club
in the world can target".
Thank
goodness it’s going to be a genuine World Cup for clubs and not, as some had suspected,
a ‘let’s get all the big teams playing each other in the middle east and then rake
in TV millions’ Cup. Mr Infantino
is clearly looking after the interests of the global game and not just building
strategic alliances by courting dodgy regimes with big barrels of cash; FIFA’s spotless
reputation means that we can trust them to look after the best interests of the
sport.
The claim
that ‘every club in the world can target’ this new competition is, though, worth
a little bit of scrutiny. In what meaningful sense can, say, Ayr United, Bolton
Wanderers or Carshalton Athletic ‘target’ the Club World Cup? FIFA has
211 member countries; the big, traditional footballing nations have thousands
of professional and semi-professional teams (if you want to make a whole morning
disappear, go look up the number of teams and leagues in Brazil). Even a small
country like Scotland has 276 registered professional and semi-professional
teams; England has 480 affiliated divisions with more than 5,000 registered teams. It would not be unreasonable to estimate that, across FIFA’s member countries, there
might be an average of, say, 750 professional or semi-professional clubs. If they
can all legitimately ‘target’ (i.e. enter) this new competition, the Club World
Cup could start with 158,250 entrants. How
might that work?
First, let’s address the question of whether games should be organised
on a one-off ‘knockout’ format, or on a ‘home and away’ basis. For the sake of argument,
let’s assume that we’ll be going with a straight knock-out format (to avoid the
tournament becoming a tad unwieldy). The
observant reader will have noticed that an ‘all-in’ draw featuring 158,250
teams in a knock-out format will, at some point, throw up an odd number of
surviving competitors. If all the teams went into the hat for the first round draw
(it will have to be a big hat … maybe a barrel would be more appropriate. Or,
now that I think about it, a skip; or rather, several skips), by round 5 we’d
be left with 9,875 teams; put simply: odd numbers don’t work in cup
competitions.
My guess,
therefore, is that FIFA will arrange a preliminary round in which the
bottom-seeded 56,416 teams will play each other for the right to enter the full
competition. Once that preliminary round has eliminated 28,808 minnows, the
first round ‘proper’ will feature 129,792 teams playing 64,896 ties.
There are
one or two practical issues to consider.
I
estimate, based on extensive research (i.e. watching the draw for the quarter-finals
of the League Cup on TV the other night), that it takes an average of 38
seconds to draw two numbered balls from a hat or barrel, or skip (or skips). With 64,896 games to arrange, our first round draw
will, therefore, take somewhere between 28 and 29 days to complete. I think FIFA
should brand this draw as a month-long celebration of football administration.
Factoring in time for commercial breaks, celebrity appearances and bringing on substitutes
when people collapse from exhaustion, the draw would be a terrific televisual
sporting event, a bit like the Super Bowl, but with less Beyonce.
As a
Scottish football fan, I’d love to see our smaller clubs get a chance to compete
on the world stage. Imagine the tantalising prospects such a draw might
deliver:
Inverurie Loco
Works v Fótbóltsfelagið Giza
Whitehill Welfare v Jagiellonia
Białystok
Esportiva
Guaxupé v Newtongrange Star
(One of
the downsides of that last tie would be that, since deregulation, the bus service
between Newtongrange and Guaxupé has been shocking;
this, combined with kick-off times designed to suit TV channels, might put off some
Newtongrange fans from travelling to Brazil).
Once the
matches get underway, they’ll probably be spread over several days in order to
maximise TV revenues; by scheduling around 1,000 games per day, the first round
could be completed in two months. I won’t go into the logistics of rounds 2 to 14,
save to say that by the time we get to round 4, the number of competing teams
will have been reduced to 16,224; by round 7, we’d be pretty much down to the
‘elite’ level of 2,028 teams. Only by round 12 will we have reached the magical number of 64 teams, proven by scientists
to be the highest number that football fans easily understand (it’s a bit like
the theory that birds can only count up to 5, which makes it OK to steal eggs
from their nests if there are 6 or more in it. Or maybe they can count up to 6?
Whatever).
If one
or two of the smaller teams manage to benefit from kind draws and a bit of luck,
there would be an outside chance of some mouth-watering quarter-final games. How
about Real Madrid v South Normanton Athletic or Kakamega Homeboyz
v Manchester City? The prosaic truth, though, is that the last eight will
probably feature world football’s most popular ‘super clubs’, plus Paris Saint Germain.
With
tight scheduling and round-the-clock fixtures, it should be just about possible
to complete the entire event within a calendar year (remembering that the first
month of each new year would be entirely devoted to making the draw for the
first round). And yes,
I’m aware that the preliminary round draw must always precede the first round.
In a tight footballing calendar, it is therefore possible that we might have to
play 28,208 preliminary round ties for ‘year two’ while the tournament for ‘year
one’ is still running. Not ideal, I know, but it would at least help FIFA
advance their strategic goal for the total football environment, i.e. televised
football happening all the time. Everywhere.
The final
will probably be played in Riyadh or Doha on Christmas Eve, kicking off at
3.25am GMT.
