Football's Final Cadence
From Fergus Suter to Saudi Arabia, the arc is complete
Fahad bin Nafel was in tears. Elbows resting on a metal railing, palms covering his face, just a man and his moment of rawness before he was ushered inside, somewhere more private. Of all the frames from this summer of sport, I quite like this one from Orlando, Florida. The President of Al-Hilal Saudi Football Club, weeping after his team beat European giants Manchester City.
I tried to file it inside football’s gallery of public outpours. Maradona drinking in the Mexico City sunlight, hands pointed skywards, after conquering the world in ‘86; Pelé at seventeen, barely able to stand after keeping a promise he’d made to his father as a child; Lionel Scaloni’s straight face breaking into sobs after it hit him that he had just coached his team to their first World Cup title in 36 years.
Nah, not quite. Pelé and Maradona were hoisted onto their teammates’ shoulders while thousands roared in approval from the stands and millions more watched from home. Scaloni’s team sent an entire country into raptures. By the time the camera found bin Nafel, the claps at the Camping World Stadium were barely audible, and no Al-Hilal player had the legs to lift anyone.
Al-Hilal are owned by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), a sovereign wealth fund set up by the Government of Saudi Arabia. So, it’s unlikely that the prize money of $13 million dollars broke bin Nafel’s dam.
It was probably the magnitude of the result. Al-Hilal’s game against Manchester City was a Round of 16 knockout match in the FIFA Club World Cup - a 32-team competition dragging an assortment of clubs from every continent. Some booked their tickets after winning domestic leagues and continental cups, some others made their way into it because apparently you can’t stage a global tournament without Lionel Messi.
Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, world football’s governing body, has repeatedly called this tournament, “the big bang” of football. And as it goes with such quotes, when powerful executives promise expansions, they don’t mean it in a straightforward way.
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Al-Hilal were Saudi football’s original aristocrats. They were set up in 1957, christened soon after by King Saud himself. Between the foundation stone and the summer of 2023, they won a record eighteen domestic league titles, along with a bagful of cups and knockout competition titles just to fill up the trophy room. At one point, you could go for a game and find Brazilian football royalty Rivellino and Mario Zagallo in their dugout. Fahad bin Nafel has been their President since 2019, so he has seen a few of those titles himself.
Then came June 2023. Four Saudi Pro League clubs, Al-Hilal among them, were transferred to the Public Investment Fund. The official line spoke of liberating state-backed teams into the free market - a narrative signed, sealed, and delivered by the Government of Saudi Arabia. Cue: Saudi clubs splashed $957 million over the summer, in transfer fees alone. Only the Premier League spent more, and not by much. Al-Hilal dropped $98 million to pry an injured Neymar from Paris, then handed him an annual contract of $104 million to effectively be a commercial puppet.
Saudi Arabian football hadn’t just arrived. It had kicked down the door.
For decades, the kingdom had been circling sport like a patient predator, nibbling away at the edges. A tournament here, a sponsorship there, the occasional high-profile final staged in Riyadh or Jeddah. Patience has now given way to ravenous appetite. Today, Saudi Arabia sits at the centre of global sport: Formula One races multiply every few years, the IPL recently held its player auction in Jeddah, LIV Golf threatens to swallow the sport whole, tennis will follow soon. At last count, Saudi Arabia had struck more than 900 major sponsorship deals across sport.
The football stuff took off when Al-Nassr - another PIF property - brought home Cristiano Ronaldo. He was suspended by Manchester United, had a shocking World Cup campaign, and predictably couldn’t find enough teams in Europe to sustain his gluten-free-water and genital-surgery1 lifestyle. Al-Nassr, or rather, the PIF, could. And if you have the money2 to get Ronaldo, you have the money to get pretty much anyone.
Al-Hilal assembled their own constellation alongside Neymar. Some were sunsetting hasbeens seeking a golden exit, but amazingly, a lot of others were at the high noon of their careers. Amongst them was Ruben Neves, captain of the illustrious FC Porto as a teenager, sought after by Europe’s elite, and suddenly, marshalling the midfield in the Saudi Pro League at the age of 26.
Football’s Eurocentric establishment choked on its champagne. The tut-tutting was loud, reaching the kind of sound you hear from two mildly-obese men outside a McDonald’s at 9pm on a Friday night, sneering at the Lamborghini that just blazed past them.
Al-Hilal’s victory against Manchester City, in a FIFA competition, was a punch to European football’s solar plexus. At least, that’s what Fahad bin Nafel clearly believed, which explains his emotions. The faces of Manchester City’s players, pale from physical and mental fatigue, barely made it to the broadcast. Understandably so, because that would’ve revealed how little the game mattered.
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Upsets are the most charming part of tournament sport. Remember the scenes when Morocco made it to the semi-final at the 2022 World Cup?
The Moroccan players collapsed on the pitch, some kneeling in prayer, others simply crying into the Qatari grass. In the stands, parents clutched their children as if the moment might evaporate. The commentators, people who live with words for a living, were stretching for the correct adjectives. Watching Sofyan Amrabat mark Bernardo Silva was a lesson in sport’s great ability to play leveller. Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier took to the streets. Some of us still have the pictures saved on our phones.
This is what tournaments promise but rarely deliver - the democratic ideal that eleven bodies in motion can rewrite history. Even if for a fleeting moment, an upset makes established hierarchies dissolve. Tradition means nothing, infrastructure is irrelevant. This feeling is unique, exclusive to those who’ve lived through drought, who understand what it means to yearn for a minute’s rain.
Look, France and Real Madrid win most of the time. They’re built for mechanical efficiency. But we endure the predictable outcomes for those immaculate vibes when Ghana or Morocco or Costa Rica make the powerful stumble, when the world tilts just enough to let light fall differently.
Gianni Infantino called Al-Hilal’s match against Manchester City, “a game for the ages” - the same words Rafael Nadal used for last month’s epic, six-hour Roland Garros final3. If these teams face each other ten more times over the next two weeks, you will bet all ten times on City. So that way, it was a typical tournament upset, the underdog tripping the overwhelming favourite.
In every other way, it wasn’t. First, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the irony of looking for “democratic ideals” as the desired outcome of a match between two clubs owned by petrostates. It’s just very funny. But, besides that, how do you judge the emotional impact of a game? From the tears in the stands, from the chaos in the streets, from the videos of three generations of a family celebrating together, from friends knee-sliding across their drawing room floor in synchronised ecstasy. That stuff can’t be faked.
But, what happens when half the stadium is empty? And what do you do when half-empty stadiums are the running theme of your tournament?
On Monday, 8th July, Chelsea played their semi-final against Fluminense in New Jersey. The demand, or the lack of it, forced FIFA to slash the standard ticket prices for the game from $473.90 to $13.40. During the tournament, attendances have averaged at 51%; and on many days, half-full is a generous thing to say for the turnout.
Admittedly, not every match has been played to a plastic audience. Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and Paris Saint-Germain have pulled crowds, but that’s despite the context. These teams would pull crowds anywhere, such is their latent magnetism, so star-packed their dressing rooms. This summer, their games were outliers.
And outliers distort reality. When your best-attended matches can only drag the overall average to 51%, the underlying emptiness becomes undeniable. Infantino had promised “104 Super Bowls” in one month4, but delivered attendance figures that wouldn’t impress a regular league weekend. Turns out it’s hard to manufacture passion for exhausted teams grinding through weekday afternoons while David Beckham and IShowSpeed wave from temperature-controlled luxury suites.
The heat hasn’t helped. Eighteen of the forty-eight group stage matches registered as ‘very uncomfortable’ on the National Weather Service scale, with six reaching ‘oppressive.’ During Borussia Dortmund’s match against Mamelodi Sundowns, their substitutes abandoned the pitchside dugout entirely, retreating to air-conditioned dressing rooms just to breathe.
Next summer’s FIFA World Cup - the actual one with national teams - is also going to be held in these cities, at the same time. Fun.
These are but minor deviations in the grand story that Gianni Infantino is keen to sell us. At the Club World Cup’s trophy-unveiling in Miami, he began strong. “We’re writing history here in North America.” Infantino has, obviously, gotten his name inscribed on the trophy. Twice.
At Miami, he continued, “They will play for this incredible trophy which is, as you can see, very special, very new, unlike any other trophy in the world of sport. It represents the past, the present, the future. It represents a big bang, because this is exactly what it is, and we thought that we would have to have an iconic trophy for an iconic competition.”
I’ve come to think of Gianni Infantino as the world’s most powerful influencer. He is a complete natural at working a room - any room - in his charcoal black suit and a smile that almost reaches his eyes. He materialises at major sporting events like a corporate spectre, and sometimes, when the money’s right, you’ll catch him dancing at a billionaire’s wedding. The man has no shame, which in his line of work counts as a qualification.
He’s been running FIFA since 2016. Two elections since then, both uncontested. The second one was such a foregone conclusion they might as well have crowned him in his sleep. He has engineered a situation where there isn’t a single man in football administration with vaguely comparable influence.
These days, he’s been busy. For one, doing the influencer stuff, feeding his 3.2 million social media followers a concoction of tripe about “an epic tournament, full of unprecedented moments, taking over the United States.”
But, offline, a lot of his time has been taken by commitments with his dear friend Donald Trump, who calls him “Jonny”. Infantino has been courting Trump. Mar-a-Lago visits, White House drop-ins, the full flirt package. And it’s working. Trump signed an executive order creating a White House Task Force for the 2026 World Cup. He tucked $625 million of security funding into what he calls his “big, beautiful” budget bill. FIFA’s even getting office space in Trump Tower, because of course they are. Two organisations with spotless reputations, finding each other at last.
Apparently, Trump will grace Sunday’s final with his presence. One assumes Infantino has already practiced his power handshake.
The FIFA Club World Cup had existed for twenty-five years, but as an almost-irrelevant, pointless tournament that spanned one December week and finished before anyone took notice. Then Infantino surveyed the landscape: overworked players, muscle injuries multiplying exponentially every season, player unions begging for mercy.
Your average elite footballer considers himself lucky to get a proper summer break. Most years, summer means work: a World Cup every four years, with Euros, Copa América, and Olympics filling the gaps. Once in a blue moon, a player might get an actual holiday, hit the beach with his children, put his feet up, get full body massages and nap through afternoons.
Infantino looked at these precious recovery windows and saw prime real estate going to waste. And boom! The Club World Cup, repackaged in gold branding.
The announcement told you everything you needed to know. Infantino unveiled his baby in a video collaboration with DJ Khaled, because nothing says “sporting legacy” quite like a man who shouts his own name for a living. A year later, that’s exactly what we’ve got: a tournament for the influencers, utterly divorced from meaning or context, serving only to line already-stuffed pockets while players pay the price with their muscle tissues.
Thankfully, for every Infantino, the gods gift us a Jürgen Klopp. It’s hard to find a more universally liked and respected man in football. A couple of weeks back, he was asked about his opinion on the Club World Cup. I’d like to think the journalist knew what he was doing, because there couldn’t have been a better person to speak about this. Klopp went straight for the jugular: “It is the worst idea ever implemented in football. People who have never had anything to do with day-to-day business or who no longer have anything to do with it come up with something.”
There was more.
“This does not mean any real recovery for the players who are there, neither physically nor mentally. An NBA player, who also earns a big salary, has a four-month break every year. This is what (Liverpool defender) Virgil van Dijk got in his entire career.”
This is the Klopp everyone knows - the man who made Liverpool believe again, who preached heavy-metal football but never forgot the humans playing it. Throughout his career, he’s raged against the machine: the packed schedules, the meaningless fixtures, the tournaments that exist solely to feed television’s insatiable thirst. His left-leaning politics show every time he speaks.
Klopp’s tirade was welcomed and echoed by most, barring the TV executives, rights holders, and generally a group of loonies who profit from perpetual motion. Kaveh Solhekol from Sky Sports offered this masterpiece of late-capitalist logic: “If you don't like the Club World Cup, don’t watch it! You can play padel, you can go for a swim. Maybe watch Netflix, go for a walk. I think the Chelsea owners are delighted that they’re here, delighted that they're making a lot of money.”
Beautiful, really. The quiet part said loud. Though Solhekol could have saved himself the trouble and just quoted Infantino from the trophy launch: “We have, as you know, USD 1 billion as the prize money. The winner can win up to USD 125 million, so this is of course very, very significant. But it’s about the glory, as well, of writing your name, the name of the winning club and of all the participating clubs - writing your name in history.”
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What stings is the brazenness of it all.
We’re at our most gullible while consuming stories. We want to believe. We know Tim Robbins isn’t really in the Shawshank State Penitentiary, but for two hours we live in his cell, feel his despair, share his triumph. We suspend disbelief because the story earns it.
Sport works the same way, only better. It’s unscripted theatre. A ball’s capacity for evoking drama remains unmatched in human entertainment. And that drama springs from jeopardy, from the beautiful possibility that anything might happen.
The University of Richmond once conducted a study called The Perception of Shapes. For $5, students had to watch four clips of 15 seconds each. The clips were similar: circles rolling up and down a hill. But each clip was slightly different from the other and students saw them in a random order. In all barring one of the four clips, there is a second circle that is quicker than the first. And every time, the students rooted for the slower circle trying to make its way up a hill.
“When the favourite you’re rooting for wins, the payoff can be tepid. A minimal spike in mood, perhaps merely a sense of relief. Throwing in with the underdog, on the other hand, is a riskier proposition, but when you hit on the long shot, the bet pays much more. Backing a favourite can’t match the exhilaration of winning with an underdog.” - L. Jon Wertheim in This is Your Brain on Sports
But how do you maintain jeopardy when the writer’s room is in a palace? When the people holding the pens are oligarchs and real estate magnates and steel tycoons? When the story’s ending is negotiated in advance by men whose idea of jeopardy is whether their private chef will be able to source sturgeon caviar for lunch?
In 1878, Fergus Suter became football’s first professional when he accepted discreet payments to play for Darwen FC. A Scottish stonemason taking £10 kicked up a stir, drew a collective indignation. Until then, football - and most sports - had been amateur, pure, untainted by commerce. Suter showed footballers that talent could demand compensation. He also, inadvertently, told the wealthy that they could buy the game.
Look how far we’ve come. From Suter’s £10 and the game’s first steps of professionalisation; from the European Cup and Premier League’s gold rush to now - when Saudi Arabia can bulk-order the world’s best footballers, and a team has to stand behind Donald Trump in the Oval Office as he speaks to television reporters about bombing Iran5.
When Fahad bin Nafel cried after his assortment of gold-plated lego pieces beat another assortment of expensive lego, it felt like the completion of an arc. The last note of a song that started 150 years ago.
Barney Ronay, writing recently in The Guardian, found some apt words: “Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography.”
While reading this, I thought back to a longform essay written by one of my favourite authors,
. It’s a typically-Samanth, immersive story about a Danish television show and layered deceit, but the finishing line has stayed with me. “The world is full of lies, not least the ones we tell ourselves.”The Premier League returns in a month. Football will be back to its sixteenth-note rhythm of matches, goals, injuries, winners, red cards, bravado, and blunders. And we will be back too, glued to the television, at odd hours of the night, convincing ourselves of the depth behind the frames.
Roland Garros have uploaded the full match on YouTube. You’re welcome.
Man! You spoke exactly how I feel about this club world-cup. Thanks!
I can’t get myself to watch it.
It's messed up, isn't it? For years, I smirked at PSG's attempts to win the UCL. Like a billionaire commissioning a Swiss watch that never showed the right time. And now that they've finally make it click, I can't stop admiring them. Fans are suckers.