Living easy, Loving free, Asking nothing. Yes, that’s right. It is now time. Welcome to the Fifa Technical Study Group weekly media briefing at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha.
Qatar is a place of constant piped music, most of it weirdly jarring. Walking down a gleaming gantry at a half-constructed training complex hangar? You’ll be wanting some Howard Jones. Shopping for groceries? Here’s a super-slow orchestral arrangement of More Than Words by Extreme that will nag away at your brain for almost three weeks before finally revealing itself, horribly, in the pastry aisle.
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For the buildup to the Fifa Technical Study Group media briefing, as scattered microphone fluffers and media footsoldiers enter the chilled air of Virtual Stadium Hall One, the selected warm-up music is an urgent, full-length recording of Highway To Hell by AC/DC. Which does at least generate a much-needed, if ultimately rather misleading, sense of urgency.
These occasions are part of the treadmill of Big Football events. Qatar 2022 has hit its last, choreographed deep breaths, the bridge before the final push. It is now time for the football version of those moments in The Office where we watch the printer trays whirring, blank sheets loading, something to feed the machine between the beats.
This is when we get the Fifa Technical Study Group media briefing, there to fill the empty air with words. Although in fairness there was a buzz of static around the Study Group briefing on Monday morning, that wide, luminous stage arranged with seven potently empty chairs, like the set for the world’s worst Westlife reunion gig.
The excitement in the room was in part because this place is now shot through with its own event glamour, the venue for That Speech by Gianni Infantino. And secondly because the last time the Study Group appeared in public Arsène Wenger breached protocol by accidentally saying something interesting.
Those comments at the end of the group stage were widely reported. According to Wenger, who was actually just there to talk about pressing and quick throw-ins, the most successful teams were those “who had the mindset to focus on the competition and not on political demonstrations”. Or in other words, zip it and stick to football.
Ah, Arsène. How did they get to you? Wenger loves Fifa these days. He is basically Fifa’s Gandalf, a craggy, legitimising, wizard-ish presence. But he is also 100% wrong, as demonstrated by those nations who progressed while waving the Palestinian rights flag.
Never mind the basic impossibility of keeping politics out of something staged entirely for and by politicians. Or indeed the fact this is from a man who previously raged about financial iniquity and waste, who may have coined the phrase ”financial doping”, but who is now out there acting as a public thought-policeman for football’s carbon-dealers. Funny how perspectives change.
Sadly there would be no Arsène today. Even Fifa seems to have noticed Wenger has gone a bit wild-eyed-uncle-in-the-shed. Instead we had a lineup of familiar old pros, lounging on their low steel chairs: Cha Du-ri of South Korea, Faryd Mondragón from Colombia, Sunday Oliseh of Nigeria, Alberto Zaccheroni of Italy, the Swiss Pascal Zuberbühler, plus the man introduced as “captain” of the Technical Group, Jürgen Klinsmann.
This was at least some consolation. Klinsmann has already caused his own stir on BBC TV by lumping together a list of disparate nations – sole common element: not being western European – as keepers of a shared culture of cheating.
Carlos Queiroz urged Klinsmann to resign. But he seems to be still here, his role now to be less unreliable, less of a loose cannon, than Wenger. Plus of course, there is always that strangely moreish voice.
For a long time Klinsmann spoke in the voice of a sad Californian robot boy who just wants to understand the meaning of the word love. He has now become sassier, communicating in the uplifting tones of a Las Vegas dinner theatre host who will eventually rip off his velcro tuxedo and join the high-kicking chorus. “Oh my God we have these discussions … twennyfourseven,” Klinsmann confided early on.
It isn’t hard to see why, because this is essentially pub chat, and quite deliberately so. Klinsmann said that if Harry Kane had taken his second penalty without a VAR interruption he would have scored. Maybe! But he also waited ages for the first one. Klinsmann said passing the ball a lot like Spain is probably overdoing it. He called Croatia “a young nation”, which may or may not be a good thing to say to a Croat.
The other guys all said stuff too, although none of it seemed that technical. Cha said “Asian players are less intimidated” than previously, one of those things you say when you’re sort of verbally sub-Tweeting someone. “The Japanese manager was born in Japan and still showed amazing tactical skills,” he added, and you knew what he meant.
Oliseh made a rousing plea for African coaches to be given greater opportunities. Zuberbühler and Mondragón then delivered a passionate two-hander about goalkeepers, who they seem to see as some kind of oppressed minority, like Iranian women or freckled redhead boys.
If Zuberbühler seemed a little overexcited about the rise in penalty saves to 34%, there was at least a hint here of exactly why Fifa does these things, of the deep meaning of the Fifa Technical Study Group weekly media briefing.
The job here, like everywhere else, is to reinforce and justify every aspect of this World Cup. Zuberbühler was basically talking about how successful he thinks Fifa’s new rules about staying on the goalline are. Earlier Zaccheroni had hymned the “technical” effects of five subs and masses of extra time.
Nothing is bad in this room. Everything is good, better, progress. At some stage everyone on stage parroted the (arguable) line that this World Cup is a showcase for emerging powers – because, of course, this is a way of selling the expanded version next time out.
“I’m looking forward to the US, Mexico and Canada. More countries, 48 nations and we will see even more surprises,” Klinsmann robot-boyed towards the end and you felt a kind of glaze wash over you, the familiar haze of approved Fifa truth in an approved Fifa zone inside this painted-backdrop of a World Cup.
The best way to get the real point of this exercise is probably to turn back to the end of Russia 2018, when the last Technical Study Group offered up its 140-page glossy report. Among the stat padding and weirdly meaningless pull quotes from Carlos Alberto Parreira, the most telling bit of copy is Zvonimir Boban’s foreword, which calls Russia “a beacon of hope and beauty” and concludes: “In Russia, they made us fall in love with our game all over again.” Follow that, Arsène. The technical bar is high.
