FootBiz newsletter #183: This will always be remembered as Trump's World Cup

The more eagle-eyed of you will have noticed that there was no FootBiz waiting for you in your inbox on Tuesday morning. Please accept my apologies. As previously mentioned, I have been trying to attend as many World Cup matches as possible while also not missing the birth of my second child, who eventually decided to turn up at the weekend. It meant watching England’s win over Norway (and Argentina’s over Switzerland) from the hospital but the good news is everyone is well and home now.

In large part due to this new addition, the newsletter I write the day after the World Cup final — which arrives with you on Tuesday — will be my last.

When we set up FootBiz, I was waiting for our deal to close to buy Querétaro, had a lot of time on my hands and felt there was a gap in the market for a publication covering these topics.

Now, I have two kids under two-and-a-half and need to prioritise building a successful club while also juggling other projects elsewhere, making FootBiz more of a time-suck and less of the fun creative outlet for me than it was at the start. It has also become much more of a difficult task to balance the things I can or can’t say with trying to provide the best possible product for you to read, and I would much rather stop before I upset someone or cause an issue than wait for it to happen and have to stop suddenly. The end of the World Cup and start of a new Liga MX season feels like the perfect time.

The good news is that Charles and Caden, who have been working behind the scenes for a couple of months now, will continue things and I am sure they will do a great job. Paul Quinn, whose work on finance and governance we have linked to plenty of times, also had his first FootBiz piece published yesterday. The volume of subscribers speaks to how in-demand and underserved this particular niche is, and I will look forward to reading the newsletter without scouring it for errors or allowing my writer’s self-loathing to consume me.

While England won’t be there in the end, Sunday still represents a bucket list occasion for me in attending a World Cup final.

Unbelievably that is 102 matches down and just two to go now, though the third-place playoff is more of a box-ticking exercise than anything you might confuse with competitive high-level sport. At least Marcus Thuram and Kobbie Mainoo can stretch their legs.

As far as tournaments go, the World Cup has been a success in the way most people care about (good, exciting football and lots of it) as well as the way FIFA cares about (made loads of money) and thus whoever wins out of Spain and Argentina on Sunday afternoon, the only guaranteed winner from all of this is FIFA president Gianni Infantino.

The Swiss lawyer has solidified his grip on world football’s governing body and will be re-acclaimed as its leader unopposed in the next 12 months. While there have been whispers of UEFA putting up a candidate, only the usual vocal opponents (Norway and a couple of others) tend to put up much of a fight these days — and even then they often know it’s futile.

With CAF, CONMEBOL and the AFC all deciding to endorse Infantino publicly before the tournament it is clear which way this will go and Infantino will serve what supposedly would be his final term. Given he has adjusted the rules once already to allow him to run again, it wouldn’t be the biggest surprise to see a confected clamour from his allies to allow him to remain, even if one FIFA source I spoke to thinks that would be a step too far for some federations and a risk not worth taking, politically, for Infantino.

More likely, as had been mentioned to me by a couple of people around the tournament this month and which I have only seen Matt Slater mention in print, Infantino could find his home atop the new FIFA joint venture with EFC, where world football’s governing body is welcoming the lobby group for the world’s biggest clubs into the decision-making (and money-making) process. That news got a little buried by the CWC’s expansion but it’s arguably a bigger story. This will solidify the richest clubs in world football as the centre of power, something irreversible and now institutionalised by the JVs that EFC has with UEFA and now FIFA. The CWC will now be a way to funnel FIFA money to the biggest clubs. Distortion is a huge risk.

First, though, he will serve another term at FIFA, and if he’s anything like most politicians in his position then he will spend the next few years trying to cement a legacy.

It’s too early to say what that would look like, especially as the AFA corruption story implicates FIFA in a way that could eventually transform how this regime is viewed.

Broadly, though, it would be a surprise if Infantino’s legacy was not one of just immense growth. Almost everything has got bigger in his time in charge; the Club World Cup has gone from a handful of teams to 32 (with possibly more to come) while the World Cup proper has expanded once, to 48 teams, and could even get bigger again.

With this comes the revenue growth, which is really what matters here. FIFA’s system is a relatively simple circle where they give the federations money every year and in return the federations elect a leader. If the leader keeps making their incomes go up, they tend to keep electing them. Since taking over in 2016, the grants received by member associations have roughly quadrupled, which means everyone has a nicer car, a nicer house and every reason to keep voting for Infantino.

For a man who seems to relish his hobby of befriending autocrats and being pictured sat alongside them, his most orange of chums has been conspicuous by his absence during this tournament.

That will all change this Sunday, when president Donald Trump attends the World Cup final and hands the trophy to either Rodri or Lionel Messi.

The bisht image from Messi’s 2022 win instantly became the most famous or iconic picture from that tournament as it helpfully captured the sportswashing backdrop to the tournament while still giving prominence to the biggest story of them all, Messi finally winning a World Cup.

The image which will come to define this tournament will be the one of Trump handing over that cup on Sunday. That’s because the competition itself will also likely be primarily remembered for his intervention.

According to his own story, he pressured FIFA to suspend Folarin Balogun’s suspension. But there’s no real obvious image for that.

Instead, the photograph of him handing over the Trophy will remind us of that context. It will also invoke the treatment of the Iranian team, the visas rejected for photographers and support staff, the FIFA Peace Prize months before bombing Iran and every other sighing disappointment. A picture speaks 1000 crimes.

Part of this is that another Spain win (people think the football is boring and it’s not their first win) or another Argentina win (all about Messi, but his second isn’t as big a story as him breaking his duck) just aren’t tremendously memorable.

Trump’s interventions in this tournament will be remembered in the same way we remember Diego Maradona failing a drugs test at USA ‘94 or Zinedine Zidane's headbutt in the 2006 final — moments that transcended the sport itself, where the defining memory of the tournament became something that happened adjacent to the football rather than within it, and which permanently coloured how the competition was subsequently understood by history.

How that picture ages with Trump front and centre, World Cup trophy in hand, will depend on how he is remembered. For example, if his name was mentioned tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files and a future president decided to declassify those in the public interest then it could end up looking quite bad. Ditto for if he was ever jailed for anything. You can use your imagination.

But at the end of the day that’s probably a fitting way for the tournament to be remembered — the football has been great, but there’s been a bit of stench about the tournament that I don’t think will get better with time. In fact, it’s far more likely to be the opposite.