Infantino’s Club World Cup is alive – and on opening night it sort of worked

On the big screen at the Hard Rock Stadium, the concentric circles of the Club World Cup spun like the rings of a new planet. FIFA president Gianni Infantino, the master of this universe, called it a “big bang moment in the history of football,” and it was finally here. Would his new competition explode into life or flame out?

Hours before kick-off, Infantino was already in the ground observing the final preparations for the inaugural game between Al Ahly and Inter Miami. He had ended his cringey call with ’90s pop stars Robbie Williams and Laura Pausini on the balcony of his South Beach hotel, in which ‘Desire’ was announced as the new official FIFA song. On Williams’ T-shirt was the slogan ‘hopeium’. It sounded like a hallucinogen capable of blocking out the negativity caused by reports of thousands of unsold tickets.

If this really was “a new era for soccer,” as Infantino claimed, it seemed, at least initially, that not many people wanted to be there for it — put off by earlier aggressive ticket pricing and, perhaps, the signalled presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Hard Rock. Some club executives of participating teams were disappointed by the lack of promotional material in cities and airports. Locals seemed confused by the concept. Isn’t the World Cup next summer? How is this different?

Ronaldo, Baggio, Beckham and Infantino at the opening game (Photo: Image Photo Agency/Getty Images)

It did not help that Al Ahly–Inter Miami clashed with other sporting events that held real meaning to local Floridians. Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final was taking place between the Florida Panthers and the Edmonton Oilers. Nationally, Caitlin Clark was making her comeback for Indiana Fever and put up 32 points. The U.S. Open at Oakmont was being aired on more mainstream channels than DAZN, the host broadcaster of the Club World Cup, who paid a billion dollars for the rights and then gave the games away for nothing.

“Tell me one top competition today where you can watch (club) football for free,” Infantino said before his tournament’s opening night. It raised the question: why sit in traffic on the way to the Hard Rock — a ground with little or no public transport links — when you can tune in online at no charge?

When Inter Miami players arrived 90 minutes before kick-off, Lionel Messi and his teammates walked out on the pitch as if unnoticed. There was barely a murmur as the biggest name in the sport surveyed his surroundings. The Hard Rock isn’t home to Inter Miami. The smaller Chase Stadium is — and while Messi and friends have attracted 62,358 fans in Chicago and 60,614 in Cleveland against Columbus Crew, locals are used to seeing him, for less, and against teams they’ve heard of.

An early national anthem was played to a far smaller crowd than were present for the game (Photo: Hector Vivas – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

As for Al Ahly, they are big in Africa; the team of the century, as the slogan on the back of their shirt collar claims. They’re the continent’s most successful team, the Real Madrid of the African Champions League, and were better represented than Inter Miami in the stands. But outside of Africa, the brand recognition does not quite compare and seemed to mean little to those outside the creditably numerous Egyptian diaspora, as well as those who made the trip from Cairo.

Notably absent was Infantino’s friend, President Donald Trump, who celebrated his birthday with a $45 million military parade in Washington, D.C. Infantino sat instead with Inter Miami co-owner David Beckham, the original Ronaldo, and his fellow Ballon d’Or winner Roberto Baggio.

The scene developing before him was not, in the end, a source of awkwardness. While there were some incongruities — such as an apparently unannounced performance of the U.S. national anthem an hour before kick-off, an opening ceremony performed amid golden rubble (one presumes left by the expensive construction of this new competition), not to mention the disorderly entrance of the teams with each player called out one-by-one just so the announcer could finish on MESSI — it sort of came together.

Performers on top of golden rubble heralded football’s ‘new era’ (Photo: Hector Vivas – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

The Messi effect clearly hasn’t waned. It remains a major draw and the Club World Cup was right to lean on it. Lines of fans in Inter Miami 10 shirts curled up the concourses at the Hard Rock. The final turn-out was announced as 60,927: 93% of the stadium’s capacity. Al Ahly, for their part, brought the noise.

“I think it was great,” Inter Miami coach Javier Mascherano said of the atmosphere. “(There were) a lot of Egyptian people. I think more than us but at the end I think it was a good party of football.”

The Dolphin blue seats of the Hard Rock began to turn pink and red, as well as the colours of Argentina and Boca Juniors, the supporters of whom are already in town for Monday’s game against Benfica. It was as if the competition was taking shape, cell by cell, evolution in real-time. Out of the Everglades, fins became limbs and gills became lungs. The Club World Cup emerged and while it wasn’t obviously beautiful, and the gaudy and gauche elements — such as the involvement of the influencer IShowSpeed in a half-time cross-bar challenge — still made it easy to be cynical, it was fun in Florida.

The thanks for making a genuine contest out of it go to Al Ahly, who played with an intensity that made Inter Miami and their veteran forward line look, for some of the first half, like a retirement community on day release from nearby Boca Raton.

El-Shenawy denies Messi (Photo: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

An Argentine was man of the match, just not the one anybody expected. It was goalkeeper Oscar Ustari and not Messi. His stops and penalty save made for an action-packed 0-0 draw, as did the heroics of his opposite number, Mohamed El-Shenawy.

From behind the glass of the Hard Rock’s press tribune, a space that has the feel of NASA’s mission control centre, we witnessed the launch of something new. It still remains to be seen where exactly the expanded, revamped Club World Cup settles in the football galaxy. It will probably never be at its centre. But the opening game did exert a greater gravitational pull than expected. As the fans twirled their way down to the exit, one fanbase sang “Messi! Messi! Messi!” while the other countered with “Al Ahly, Ahly, Ahly!”

This thing is real, after all. This is Infantino’s Club World Cup and we are now living in it.