FIFA’s grubby little sideshow is a stain on football. Celtic would unwise to lend it credibility.

It was good to see Paul Brennan over on CQN this morning, taking a shot at the FIFA Club World Cup. My old man and I watched the first two games. One was a nil-nil no-show, and the other was about as spectacular a mismatch as you could ever hope to witness—if “hope” is the proper word for it.

The opening game in particular leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. It was between the Egyptian champions, Al Ahly, and the US side, Inter Miami, who by all rights ought not to have been in the competition in the first place. But they were shoehorned in as hosts just to get Lionel Messi at the tournament. FIFA, who had started out with a set of criteria for qualifying, ditched it almost as soon as they could. What emerged instead was a bit of a shambles. It is in no way what it was originally set out to be.

There was a qualifying system, but it’s so convoluted and complex that it’s better not even trying to go into it. Paul’s description of it as a tawdry competition is wholly justified, and there is nothing about it which makes a kernel of sense. Football did not need another 32-team tournament. It did not need clubs to subject players—who have already played the longest season in living memory—to even more games.

UEFA has already made its move and is leaning on Infantino to increase the size of the tournament for next time around, or at least to expand European participation in it. If it intends to get its way—and I suspect that it will—this tournament is here to stay, and it’s only going to grow. But because it’s not annual and it’s cyclical, the qualifying criteria will remain weird and opaque. And the rich clubs, which are there every year, will only get richer.

Here’s the thing, though: those clubs are never going to be able to cope with the expanded schedules that this tournament brings about. So the clubs which currently dominate at the top of Europe are going to face two choices—either spend even more money building ever-bigger squads to cope, or lose their pre-eminent place at the top of the game. And a brand-new set of clubs will supplant them at the summit of European football. Then what happens? Of course, those clubs will have to play an enhanced number of games as well.

We are going to burn footballers out. By the time this generation of players retires, footballers will have no such thing as a summer break. It’s bad enough in international competition years—of which there are now two in every four. If we’re now going to add this to the list, when are players supposed to get any downtime? This competition runs right through June and July, and then you’re into August and pre-season training and the toughest fixture lists that have ever been devised. The rewards of a football career are greater than ever before. So too are the demands.

The increase in the number of European teams is interesting. The Ibrox club was in a small group of sides that actually had a chance of qualifying for this iteration of the competition. By that token, if this had been an expanded tournament with more European places, they might even have made it. The financial rewards for that are nowhere near as lucrative as some in the media were speculating at the time.

But actually, I can’t think of anything that would have been more catastrophic to their team, or to their players, than a summer of football at the end of a draining season—after which they would have had to go straight into Champions League qualifiers. And that’s the real risk every club participating in this tournament is taking. It’s why I would hope that Celtic would look beyond the money if, by some chance, we ever qualified. I think it could imperil our entire season.

Liverpool have just won the Premier League. Their main challengers next season are expected to be Manchester City—participating in this tournament. Another of their primary contenders is Chelsea—also in this tournament. In Spain, Real, Barcelona and Atlético are all taking part. Dortmund and Bayern are there from Germany. PSG, of course, are in from France. Inter Milan and Juventus make up the Italian contingent. Benfica and Porto are also represented.

The other European team is a strange one: RB Salzburg. The way the qualification system works is that the nine biggest clubs with the highest continental coefficient scores get into the tournament—Salzburg were bringing up the rear on that one.

Every single one of the clubs which has made it to the competition is vulnerable next season. Every one of them is going to find it difficult to keep their players in good shape for the duration of a lengthy domestic campaign. As such, any of those clubs could burn out completely long before their domestic season finishes. If City or Chelsea, for example, end up in a tight fight for the title, don’t expect them to come out on top.

There will be knock-on effects in their Champions League form as well. And curiously enough, we should be watching that with interest—because those teams, the ones competing in this tournament, are some of the ones you’d want us to get in the groups. It’s not impossible that we’ll catch them at the right time. It’s not impossible that they’ll be wrecked with fatigue. It won’t be difficult to imagine managers coming out in the aftermath of games and saying that if only their players had had a proper pre-season…

Don’t forget too that some of these guys went into this tournament straight from Nations League games—pointless, stupid Nations League games. And so the window in which players can get downtime and recover their fitness gets smaller every year. Christ, even our own club is going into the month of July packed with fixtures. I don’t mind that we’ve picked up a couple of glamour friendlies. But five games in a month, before we go into August and a brand-new league campaign?

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t complain. I can’t complain. I’ve missed football. I’ve missed real football, and the FIFA Club World Cup doesn’t feel like football. I have a craving to watch Celtic again. I’m jonesing to see our own team play. But this is not a format in which I’d like to see us. Because even though we’re not there, and even though our players have had the month of June—those who weren’t called up for that stupid Nations League series of games—in which to sit down and recover from what has been an arduous season, where we challenged on all fronts, got to two finals, won a title, and reached the latter stages of the Champions League… I welcome the longer break just for the sake of the footballers at the club.

So it’s not even just that I think the whole thing is a bit shabby and grubby and done for the purposes of making FIFA some money, and trying to give them their own equivalent of the Champions League. It’s that it’s pointless and needless and stupid to inflict this on footballers who are already playing more games than ever. It’s obvious, too, that it’s done for the benefit of only a handful of clubs.

I’d very much like to see our club take a principled stand on this and make a solemn vow never to take part in this competition. Or if we do, to treat it with the contempt it deserves and send the youth team. In the history of FIFA bad ideas, this one might be the worst of all. We should have no part in it if our time ever comes.