The "too much football" tipping point

These businessmen are bad at business

You’re all familiar with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, right? There have been so many versions around the world that chances are you’ve caught an episode or two somewhere.

The original British version started in 1998 and proved a success straight away. It initially would air over ten consecutive nights before disappearing for a few months and doing the same thing again. It caught fire with that gimmick, running hot for two years before ITV decided to move it to a more normal once-a-week schedule. It ran in the UK for 14 years, before audiences’ tastes inevitably changed and it needed a four-year rest, coming back in 2018. By any stretch of the imagination, the format has been an inarguable success on British TV.

The format was so good that it got sold to many different countries, none more notable than the United States. Launching a year later, it also proved a hit in America, reigniting ABC after the network had struggled in the ratings for some time. It was so successful that the chairman of ABC, Bob Iger, had the bright idea to air it three nights a week, later five nights a week, all the time. Millionaire was everywhere. It was on constantly. And, as sure as the Sun sets in the West, this killed its popularity. The ratings collapsed, the show got cancelled in 2002, and ABC was suddenly in an even worse position than they had been before stumbling on what was supposed to be a redefining hit show. It was a pretty textbook case of oversaturating the market.

I wonder how many football executives know that story.

People have talked a lot about players dealing with too many games recently. Rodri (who won’t be playing many games at all this season now) claimed that players were “close” to striking over the issue. Alisson made the same point, stating that “everybody knows what we think about having more games”. Thibaut Courtois had the same message, arguing that “people say we earn a lot of money, that we can’t complain, and that’s true, but we have to find a balance because the best aren’t always going to be able to play”. Managers have long struck the same tone, with Pep Guardiola and Enzo Maresca backing those claims recently.

The consensus is building that we have a clear choice: protect the players and the health of the game, or chase yet more money for more spectacle. Tim Spiers at The Athletic was particularly damning about this. “We, the media, or fans, we’re all complicit in that we just keep gobbling all the football up in our metaphorical goal mouths”, Spiers wrote. “We pay Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Amazon, CBS and whoever else to watch the games, we incessantly scour social media for football content, or play fantasy football, or download club apps […] we’re all to blame”.

I think this is a false choice. I think almost no one actually wants the various changes to the football calendar and it’s coming entirely from a small number executives, who are both self-interested and deluded about how their business actually works.

Let’s start with FIFA, the biggest and most obvious – though certainly not the only – offenders. Gianni Infantino has tried to position himself as a sort of revolutionary since becoming President in 2016, and clearly wants a “legacy” as a modernising force in football. The 2018 World Cup, his first in charge, was the first “major” tournament to use VAR, for example. From the 2026 edition onwards, the tournament is being expanded to 48 teams, increasing the number of games from 64 to 104. It starts on June 11th, without a single rest day until July 8th. In that 20-day stretch of games, most days will have four matches, with as many as six at times (though presumably they’ll be played simultaneously). I have no idea what my plan is for covering it all, but that’s not your problem. Your problem is: how many of these games are you actually going to watch?

Yes, a few of you are true #sickos who will sit in front of the television all day for a month watching football. But most of you will not. Hopefully, you’ll still be subscribing to my newsletter, and a lot of you will probably read it wanting to understand just what happened in the games you missed. Which is fine when you have lives and jobs and families and such things. But it means fewer people are going to be truly dedicated. It means the group stage feels a little more like optional viewing, especially with what will probably be plenty of dead rubber games. It takes the glamour away, just a touch.

Infantino pushed to hold a World Cup every two years instead of every four. That idea failed, though FIFA still seem to be interested in trying to have it take place every three years, at least. The motivation is clear: FIFA makes the vast majority of its money from running and selling the World Cup, so it would like more of them. I don’t think this will happen, but let’s just imagine it does. We’ll have the 2034 Men’s World Cup in a decade as usual, followed by the Women’s World Cup in 2035. Then in 2036, in theory, we would have a now-usual edition of the Club World Cup. You can see the thinking here: a FIFA tournament every year. Infantino is making claims on the football calendar real estate.

The Club World Cup itself is the most egregious of these. Let’s be fair to the concept for a second. There are huge football clubs around the globe which have been shut out of the elite game because they don’t happen to be in Europe. Al Ahly of Cairo, for example, is a huge club with passionate supporters who should feel excited at the prospect of playing in the Club World Cup. They’re entitled to want this. There are surely young people living in Cairo who get more out of the Premier League or La Liga superclubs than Al Ahly or Zamalek. Who can blame them when Egypt’s greatest-ever footballer plays in England? That’s an imbalance that does need to be addressed.

But you cannot just add it onto a congested calendar and expect a global audience to show up. The tournament is due to take place next June and still doesn’t have a single broadcast deal, sponsor or stadium. Adam Crafton reported that “FIFA’s financial expectations are wildly different to the value currently perceived by TV networks and streaming platforms”, with FIFA seemingly seeing this as a crown jewel in the football calendar and cynics viewing it as an elevated preseason friendly tournament where Real Madrid might put five past Ulsan HD. It’s almost like fans aren’t actually demanding any of this.

If we were to really redress imbalances, we’d have to take something away from the elite European calendar to give it to clubs like Al Ahly. And that’s definitely not happening any time soon. UEFA have added more games to the Champions League this season because they, too, don’t want to lose out to rivals. Did you know that the new “League Phase” won’t conclude until the end of January? We’ll then get two weeks before the new knockout round play-offs, followed by the usual Round of 16. We’re not going to have a calendar month for the rest of the season without some Champions League football.

The domestic leagues and cup competitions aren’t giving up any real estate. Nor is international football. No one is giving up any space to make room for this new stuff because they’re all different organisations with their own agendas. There is no coherent strategy at play. They’re going to stretch the players thin because no one else is budging and the players don’t have a voice in the room. More importantly in the long run, they’re going to stretch audiences thin.

From what little I’ve heard of sports broadcasters, high-level executives seem to believe that if demand for football is plateauing, they need to increase supply in order to make the line go up. All of these people have fancy MBAs and I do not, but I don’t think that’s the whole story with supply and demand. I don’t believe adding more and more games will create healthy and sustainable revenue for football. There does come a point when this is all too much, when people can’t commit so many hours to watching, and that has to hurt revenue.

I don’t know how we break this cycle. There’s no strategic vision at the top of football because there is no top of football. It’s just conflicting interests pulling in different directions without anyone really knowing what they’re doing. I don’t know. I wish I could end this on a more optimistic note. But fundamentally, the players striking would save the game from itself. This model isn’t going to work forever. Someone needs to realise that less is more.