There are some nice angles to FIFA’s Club World Cup. Here’s one: Auckland City. Here’s another: their goalkeeper. That would be a guy named Conor Tracey, who is 28 years old and earns his living operating a forklift truck.
He’s taken a month off his work in a pharmaceuticals warehouse, and a chunk of that leave will be unpaid, but on Sunday he plays against Bayern Munich in Cincinnati.
He’ll be fronting up to Harry Kane and hoping his back doesn’t give him any issues – the day job has caused a bit of wear and tear. At the other end, Bayern have Manuel Neuer in the Tracey role and he will face Angus Kilkolly, a sales manager in the power tools business.
The Auckland captain? That’s Mario Ilich, a Coca Cola rep, and the star power in defence comes from Adam Mitchell, an estate agent who had a season at Bolton Wanderers but couldn’t get a game.
Notionally, none of those fellas in the Auckland squad are paid for what they do in New Zealand’s amateur footballing system, save for weekly expenses of up to £70, and volunteers mow their pitch.
But they know how to win at their level. They do it a lot – Auckland City make a habit of cleaning up domestically and have won the Oceania Champions League 13 times in 18 seasons, which is how they keep getting their ticket to Club World Cup.
Auckland City goalkeeper Conor Tracey is one of the feel-good stories of the Club World Cup
Like his team-mates, Tracey has another job – working in a pharmaceuticals warehouse
Gianni Infantino’s grubby, contrived vanity project threatens to tear up leagues worldwide
This will be their 12th edition and once upon a time, in 2011, they were third. Back then it was a different breed of tournament, mind, and Opta’s ranking of 4,957th is ever so slightly closer to the mark.
Games against Bayern, Benfica and Boca Juniors? It’s a wonderful scenario, really, hence why their story has been told by a few outlets in the past week.
So here’s the trickier angle: what happens when Auckland City get back from the United States?
Or to see that slightly differently, if they are already the PSG of the North Island in terms of sporting success, what impact will their massively inflated participation fee of £2.64million have on those trying to overtake them at home? It’s not an unreasonable hope – currently Auckland City are only third in their regional league.
It might seem a tiny concern to us, but there have been awkward, unresolved conversations in New Zealand about how much of that cash will be shared among their regional opposition. There have also been awkward, unresolved conversations about how ‘amateur’ some of those teams truly are.
If the bulk of money therefore goes Auckland City, they can move to a different level altogether, which might not count as much in an amateur league, but will sting like hell for other clubs in Oceania who might wish for their slice of the FIFA jackpot in future. If Auckland are hard to edge out now, soon it will be impossible.
Again, these echo like small-time issues to us. But there are similar concerns in Argentina about what effect the financial injections of the Club World Cup will have on their league, too.
Just for turning up, Boca Juniors and River Plate will get around £11million each, which is worth stacking against the low six-figure sum pocketed by Platense for beating them to the Argentine league title. It stands to reason that other nations will have identical worries.
Auckland City play in an amateur league in New Zealand but earning more than £2million here could propel them into a different realm
Disruption was always Infantino’s aim and game – he watches the Champions League and wants his own format
‘Interest in the Club World Cup has been next to none’ according to a line in USA Today
All of which might be argued away as the spoils of success – it’s how the economics of sport work, right? Except it’s more tempting to see these as new problems that have sprung up from nowhere and now require urgent mitigation to avoid serious distortions to ecosystems.
And hasn’t that been the theme of this nonsensical tournament all along? It’s a grubby, contrived vanity project of Gianni Infantino that was neither needed nor asked for; a construct that will send ripples of varying consequence around the footballing world, whether they are perceived through the prism of welfare for exhausted players from the big leagues, PSR buffers, or the dominance of some amateurs in New Zealand.
Then again, disruption was always Infantino’s aim and game. We know he casts envious eyes at what UEFA have with the Champions League and wants to build his own, only it is disruption without justification – he is shifting a product that is irrelevant to all except those who draw fortunes from it.
I have been in the United States all week and barely heard a murmur locally about this tournament. The most notable line I’ve come across was in USA Today: ‘Despite FIFA’s desperate pitch to fans, interest in the Club World Cup has been next to none.’
That was about the ticketing shambles. Having undermined the competitive integrity of their own show to let Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami in through the backdoor, FIFA still ended up slashing admission prices to a sixth of the original or less.
By Saturday evening’s opening match, featuring Messi, they were offering tickets for as little as $4 if students bought a bundle of five.
It was the level of embarrassment Infantino deserved, and this in a country where sport, football included, is lapped up if folk believe it matters.
In the past few days, I’ve seen screens broadcasting US Open golf, Stanley Cup ice hockey, basketball, baseball and college athletics – it all fetched eyeballs, just like the Premier League does, because they have meaning. History. Sporting relevance.
FIFA have slashed admission prices to a sixth of the original or less due to poor ticketing demands – despite letting Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami in through the backdoor
The Club World Cup isn’t the Champions League – it doesn’t come close to its billing and it cannot balance the disruption it has caused
The Club World Cup can sprinkle a bit of Messi and $1billion in prizes but it doesn’t tick any of those boxes. It isn’t the Champions League, it doesn’t come close to its billing and it cannot balance the disruption it has caused. All it has so far proven is that even football has a saturation point.
But this isn’t on the game; it’s on a product that felt tacky straight out of the box.
For those reasons, we might call it the LIV Golf paradox – all the money and noise and talent in the world cannot guarantee that an audience will care to see it. Perhaps one of Infantino’s mates in Saudi Arabia ought to have offered a warning.
Bless him, the guy thought he was shooting fish in a barrel and the early signs are he blew off one of his toes instead. That might have been mildly amusing if he was the only party affected.
Sinfield after Becks?
David Beckham has his long-pursued knighthood and that’s grand. If they could only find a way to expedite the wait for Kevin Sinfield, then that would be even grander.
A swing too far
I like golf’s US Open because it’s unique. They want to challenge the pros with a harder breed of course and there’s fun in that. But Oakmont has also proven this week that the entertainment wears awfully thin when golfers are repeatedly forced to hack out sideways from near-unplayable rough.
There is an art to a well-executed recovery shot and it has been a little lost on a tournament that might benefit from dusting off some old Seve Ballesteros tapes.
Kevin Sinfield should be next up for a knighthood after David Beckham picked up his this week
It was a year ago this month that Gareth Southgate was on the receiving end of beer cup missiles on his way to taking England to a final
You don’t know what you’ve got…
It was a year ago this month that Gareth Southgate found himself targeted by neanderthals with beer cups on England’s way to a final.
Funny how much perspective can be achieved in a short space of time.
