Keir Radnedge Fixture congestion
European football is teetering on a knife-edge. One positive COVID test too many, and the entire tightrope could sever with consequences far more financially damaging than even this year’s initial lockdown.
This has come as no surprise to FIFPRO. The international players’ union has been warning FIFA, UEFA and the European leagues and clubs about the increasing risks of a fixtures logjam to players’ short-term fitness and long-term health.
Those warnings were repeatedly drowned out by trumpets proclaiming the equation of more competitions + more matches = more money. After all, came the response to FIFPRO, it’s your members whose pay packets will benefit. Why deny them the rewards of their extra labours?
The fixtures confusion created by the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a mixed response in Europe. Some leagues shut down immediately, others waited to resume behind closed doors, then UEFA devised its Final Eight tournaments to resolve the Champions and Europa Leagues.
Before the action kicked off in Portugal and Germany, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin insisted that this revised solution was a one-off reaction to the emergency, never to be repeated. But no one, in this pandemic world, can see even six months ahead. Before the Champions League final, Ceferin was conceding that, just maybe, the enforced format had some merit.
A repeat may prove inevitable. Ceferin had learned, fast, that the route ahead for football, even within its date-specific international calendar, is clouded in doubt.
Today’s fans are oblivious to the bad old days of the mid-20th century when international and domestic competitions tumbled all over each other. As late as the 1970s, star South American players missed World Cups because their clubs refused to release them. Not until 20 years ago was a formal international calendar laid down.
It was devised by Michel Platini, at the behest of then FIFA president Sepp Blatter. Platini, in his pre-UEFA days, did a good job. The calendar slotted national team dates around domestic demands and international club needs. It was jammed tight, but it worked – and the big clubs still had the freedom to undertake lucrative preseason trips around north America and Asia to suit their multi-national sponsors.
How FIFA and Blatter paid Platini for his labours is now, two decades later, the subject of a Swiss criminal investigation. But that is a story for another day.
Platini did not envisage that Champions League groups might not kick off until October; he did not envisage that UEFA might create a Nations League to further clog up the works; he did not envisage the complex intermingling of Nations League with Euro 2020 play-offs.
No sooner are they out of the way in the spring then national managers must confront the World Cup qualifying challenge. This is already a struggle for the rest of the world. In both Asia and South America, postponements of six months or more have been enforced. Why should Europe, with its later start, have it any easier?
That is why FIFA has conceded that national team breaks can now be triple-headers instead of just double-headers. That is why domestic cups are jettisoning two-legged ties and replays. That is why UEFA has ruled that multiple postponements because of positive COVID tests are not possible. Teams undermined by quarantine and isolation orders will be deemed to have forfeited their matches, losing them without a ball being kicked.
This draconian solution emphasises how impossibly tight the calendar has become. No room for manoeuvre. No room for unexpected interruptions, delays, deferments. Even bad weather is a threat to the calendar, never mind a global pandemic.
No room for manoeuvre. No room for unexpected interruptions, delays, deferments. Even bad weather is a threat to the calendar, never mind a global pandemic
If Europe’s clubs had only their own competitions for concern that would be enough. But no date has yet been agreed for the Nations League finals, the delayed Euro 2020 finals are scheduled for June 11-July 11, non-European players will be fretting over their participation in the CONCACAF Gold Cup (July 10 to August 1) and South American stars may be busy all next summer with World Cup qualifiers and the pushed-back Copa America.
Beyond all that, domestic calendars will have to start the reshuffle, which takes account of the winter scheduling of the 2022 World Cup finals in Qatar.
Even the grand design of the president of FIFA himself has been cast overboard.
Gianni Infantino brought a big idea with him on assuming command of world football in 2016. As general secretary of UEFA he had seen the popular and financial magnetism of the Champions League. As new president of FIFA, why not kidnap that magic with an expanded Club World Cup?
After all, even after splashing the millions to attract Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, Manchester United & Co, think of the zillion dollars of profit. Then FIFA could spread even more “development” cash among its 211 FAs and, since most were impoverished minnows, they would gratefully vote for their president again, again and again.
Indeed, one day the voting weight of those minnows in FIFA Congress might even change the statutes so that the president would no longer be bound by that nuisance rule restricting him to a maximum of three four-year terms. What could possibly go wrong? Now Infantino’s “Big Idea” is just one more COVID casualty.
His expanded Club World Cup was planned for China next summer, with 24 teams, half of them from Europe. That has been drowned out. Firstly FIFA hit problems over funding. Then came opposition from UEFA, wary of the threat to the status of its Champions League. Finally came a in the rescheduling to 2021 of everything from Euro 2020 to the Olympic Games.
This is deeply worrying for FIFA. Its wealth is generated only by the World Cup. All its other competitions run at a subsidised loss. It mined its reserves to prop up small FAs hit by the pandemic. But the reserve fund was established to cover a force majeure wipe-out of a World Cup. It is not a bottomless well of cash, an inexhaustible revenue resource for an under-pressure president.
Infantino says the Club World Cup will be slotted back into the calendar when circumstances permit, for both sporting and financial reasons. But no one can say when. No one can predict how or even whether the current calendar can survive. It’s tight enough as it is, never mind new competitions. Playing out the present programme may even be too much to ask.
In the event of a second wave, who knows what will happen.
LAW AND DISORDER
Sport and the law do not co-exist comfortably. Statutes of all the world’s associations and confederations prohibit fighting out football battles in the civil courts. Everyone is supposed to accept the verdict of the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne.
But, repeatedly, the status of CAS is coming under scrutiny. A review last year recommended that some hearings should be held in public, for the sake of transparency. That justice should be seen to be done. So far that has fallen on deaf ears.
The Trinidad & Tobago FA wanted to protest to CAS against FIFA’s imposition of a normalisation committee. It pulled back when the financial consequences became apparent and went to the local High Court instead. FIFA threatened international suspension.
Separately, FIFA president Gianni Infantino became the subject of a Swiss criminal investigation arising out of a series of meeting with the now-departed Attorney-General. “Absurd,” Infantino has called it. He has been cleared by FIFA’s tame ethics committee, but of what, no one knows.
Murmurings of concern have arisen within the European, African and South American confederations. But that, for now, is probably the limit in this COVID-19 era: mere whispers. There are other priorities. It’s an ill wind, indeed.
Read more on TTFA v FIFA on page 90.