Yield of Dreams

Build a tournament and all the old celebrities will come. It might make money, but let's stop pretending the Club World Cup has anything to do with sporting integrity

What is the Club World Cup? Perhaps it was inevitable from the moment that Lionel Messi’s passage into the tournament was smoothed by Fifa that Cristiano Ronaldo would end up playing in the US this summer. Certainly in hindsight, Fifa’s decision to institute a new transfer window to allow clubs to sign players before the tournament can be seen as a cynical way of engineering his presence. Marketing people, perhaps, will say this is all right and proper, but the efforts to engineer a transfer for Ronaldo to ensure he plays in the Club World Cup means that it increasingly feels less like sport than entertainment product.

Why stop there? Could Neymar somehow be smuggled from Santos to one of the qualified clubs? Could Zlatan Ibrahimović be lured out of retirement? Perhaps AI could conjure the ghost Stanley Matthews to wobble down the wing for whoever wants him? Maybe this will add to crowds and intrigue. Maybe the tournament will make an enormous profit and be heralded as a tremendous success. Maybe those of us who feel deeply uncomfortable about the whole affair will in time look as blinkered as the Football Association mandarins who turned up their nose at the first World Cup. But this does not feel like football.

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