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When Crystal Palace won the FA Cup last season, their team was not littered with superstars but rather bargains plucked from the Championship and beyond.

It was a triumph celebrated not merely in south London because this was the perfect reward for years of getting it right, of punching above thanks to the sheer quality of their pound-for-pound recruitment.

Beating Manchester City only amplified this achievement, and central to this maiden major trophy were Eberechi Eze, Jean-Philippe Mateta, Marc Guehi, Adam Wharton and Daniel Munoz – a quintet who cost £76.3m combined. Josko Gvardiol cost City £77.5m alone.

That £76.3m represented shrewdness. Signings from Queens Park Rangers, Mainz, Chelsea, Blackburn Rovers and Genk respectively, with risk deemed low but the potential great, in keeping with the £3m spent on Wilfried Zaha and £8m on Michael Olise – the streets won’t forget a £10m Yohan Cabaye, either.

Compare that to the £83m spent this winter transfer window, on merely two players where Palace twice broke their club record and were outspent only by Manchester City in Europe, and the strategy that brought (and bought) them their finest hour has been thrown out the window nine months later.

And for what? It begs the awkward question.

Have Palace gone backwards?

The price tags will weigh heavy on £48m Jorgen Strand Larsen and £35m Brennan Johnson for the remainder of this campaign.

JSL. pic.twitter.com/sNQyq7OBQ9

— Crystal Palace F.C. (@CPFC) February 2, 2026

Through no fault of their own, the duo arrive as a symbol of rash thinking after years of careful steps, as proof the club can spend – seemingly to appease fans – while forgoing the how and the why.

Immediately, both are tasked with plugging gaps a year after the club’s annus mirabilis, and it is an unenviable position amid a period of great unrest, with Eze and Guehi gone, and Mateta and Wharton primed to follow manager Oliver Glasner out the door this summer as well.

Mateta would have left already were it not for a dodgy knee, and as he considers surgery after his deadline-day move to AC Milan collapsed due to a failed medical, the onus passes to Strand Larsen in attack – and in kind for winger Johnson to pass to the Norwegian No 9.

It is not a combination that will frighten defences, Strand Larsen with his one league goal this season, and Johnson whose two league goals came in August for Tottenham Hotspur. His last assist was in April.

2016 all over again

With 2016 nostalgia rippling across social media at the start of this year, Palace have followed suit, Strand Larsen and Johnson mirroring two arrivals from 10 years ago.

Then, in the summer before the 2016-17 season, Palace’s top two signings were striker Christian Benteke from Liverpool and winger Andros Townsend from Newcastle United.

Benteke joined for a club-record £27m after failing to impress Jurgen Klopp in his new role at Liverpool, while Townsend had fallen out of favour at Tottenham before spending just six months on Tyneside.

The parallels are there, although the die is yet to be cast on Strand Larsen, who it is worth noting scored 14 league goals last season and this term was not solely to blame for a generationally-bad Wolves side sinking without a trace.

Palace fans will therefore hope for a repeat of Benteke’s goalscoring exploits from Strand Larsen, with the former scoring 17 times in his first season at Selhurst Park.

What they will be out to avoid however is the chaos that season ignited. Alan Pardew left in December 2016, to be replaced by Sam Allardyce, who then resigned in the summer of 2017 before Frank de Boer took charge for all of four leagues games.

Just 10 months on from Pardew’s departure, along then came Roy Hodgson, who brought not the spectacular but valuable stability, with a four-year stint that helped build the foundations which would take them to silverware at Wembley.

The very core of that achievement was recruitment. Signing relative unknowns and polishing them into stars. Munoz, a £6.8m signing, was man of the match, while goalscorer Eze would go on to join Arsenal for £60m.

Eze going made Palace £40.5m profit but not sourcing a replacement catapulted them into this current mess, and having now ignored their own transfer policy the biggest decision of all awaits this summer: not who to add to their squad, but who will oversee it.

Much like Strand Larsen and Johnson, good luck to whoever fills Glasner’s shoes. How do you replace a manager who delivered the FA Cup and could yet lead them to a European trophy?

The harsh reality is that you probably can’t.

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There really are no winners in the aftermath of Alexander Isak’s acrimonious transfer saga.

The player has endured a personal nightmare at Liverpool. An inauspicious start preceded a long injury lay-off, just as he had started to find his goalscoring touch.

Isak should have left St James’ Park a hero, having fired Newcastle to their first trophy in 70 years only a few months before. Instead, the Swede is not welcome north of Scotch Corner.

In hindsight, Liverpool did not even need to sign him. They overloaded their strikeforce with too many big-money signings, causing Arne Slot to make his early season line-ups too top heavy, to title-defence-ending consequences.

It is Newcastle, however, who are suffering most. Replacing a player so instrumental to everything they achieved under Eddie Howe was near impossible. Add that to their chaotic structure behind the scenes, something only recently rectified, and the talent identification process in place was not of sufficient calibre to use the money from Isak’s sale wisely.

Creating four big chances at the Etihad in a semi-final second leg, with the tie already almost out of reach before a ball was kicked, is no mean feat. Missing all of them is an even greater accomplishment. The fact, in a 3-1 victory, that goalkeeper James Trafford was one of Manchester City’s standout players, shows just how close Newcastle were to at least making Pep Guardiola worry he might be deprived of a 22nd Wembley appearance.

“Whenever you come here, creating chances is difficult but I felt we were very much in the game,” Howe said. “Joe Willock has a big opportunity to equalise and that was the story of the first half. “We still believe we are a good team. We just need to protect confidence levels at all costs.”

The difference between the good and the great at Newcastle was Isak. A strike pairing of Anthony Gordon and Nick Woltemade just does not work at the elite level.

Woltemade has the nice touches, while Gordon possesses the ability to run in behind, but all too often in the first half they were operating in opposite roles to their individual qualities – only they will know why.

Woltemade is the perfect example of how a team of Newcastle’s size will always struggle to replace a player like Isak. Their top targets this summer were Hugo Ekitike – who Jamie Carragher already believes is better than Fernandes Torres at Liverpool and Wayne Rooney has likened to Romario – Bryan Mbeumo, already one of Manchester United’s best signings in a decade, Joao Pedro and Benjamin Sesko.

Newcastle were very much in the running for all four. But when Liverpool, Manchester United or Chelsea enter the picture, there is only going to be one winner.

Without a functional transfer hierarchy, the only option then is to overpay for proven Premier League players from lower-ranking clubs, or take a gamble from overseas where, no matter how many Wyscout clips you watch, the only way you will really know how successful they will be is to splash the cash and cross your fingers.

Woltemade started well, scored some sublime goals, but he isn’t going to get anything close to the numbers Isak produced, which is ultimately what he was signed for.

Anthony Elanga is another case in point. A good player, with talent to make a difference on occasion, but £55m should get you more than one goal all season thus far.

Newcastle’s side is littered with signings yet to really make an impact. There is time to turn things around, however, especially in this season where none of the usual elite, Arsenal aside, have hit top gear.

Yoane Wissa is the latest big outlay to regain full fitness, Howe’s last stand. Howe may not be under pressure yet, but would a bottom-half finish be tolerated at a club whose chief executive recently revealed the plan is to make Newcastle one of the biggest clubs in the world by 2030?

Isak’s signing could bring about the end of two managers at two separate clubs. Quite some going.

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If you have never been to Spotland before – and this is my first visit – then believe me when I say that the conditions are perfect: early February, freezing cold with the promise of snow, breath filling the air and the warm orange glow of clubhouse rooms and bars creating huddles of beery merriment.

Borehamwood have brought only 25 supporters to Rochdale on a Tuesday night. Each of them deserves a medal.

For Rochdale AFC, life is good again. No team in England’s top six tiers has won a higher percentage of its games this season.

By the end of the evening, after a 4-1 win over a supposed promotion rival, Rochdale will have the most points of any team too. They are top of the National League with two games in hand and the chants emanating from the Pearl Street End celebrate as much.

Rochdale have suffered enough that this season is more of a karmic rebalance than a march to glory. It is a painful game you can play with plenty of former crisis clubs, but still: five years ago they were 18th in League One and that season they drew with Sunderland in a league game.

Crisis averted

Ostensibly, two things happened in tandem. Firstly, in 2021 the club was subject to a hostile takeover from Morton House MGT, an organisation that effectively tried to acquire shares without speaking to board members or informing the EFL.

Rochdale were eventually given a suspended six-point deduction through no fault of anyone in charge and the takeover was averted. As everyone on Tuesday is keen to tell me, it would have been a disaster.

But at the same time, money was running out. Rochdale were a fan-owned club overachieving in the third tier and then relegated to League Two, environments where the finances do not make sense and clubs repeatedly submit annual losses that would be deeply alarming in any normal business.

“We had problems anyway with a previous chief executive and shareholder and a couple of the directors,” co-chairman Simon Gauge tells me before Tuesday’s match in a bar in the Main Stand as supporters begin to mill around.

“It’s alright if you’re coming up from nothing and you can keep control of your costs, but when you’ve already incurred those costs, it is impossible. 

“You’re down to the bare minimum staff; you can’t do much on the football pitch. We just didn’t have the cash to carry on existing. If the eventual takeover hadn’t gone through that night, we would have been in liquidation the next day and the club would have died. I spoke to administrators and they wouldn’t have touched it. It would have been immediate liquidation.”

The local benefactor

All the while, Rochdale were dropping and so too was their revenue potential. In May 2023 they finished bottom of League Two and were relegated to non-league football for the first time since their original invitation to the Third Division North in 1921.

The warning to clubs in similar situations is that benevolent, wealthy, local owners do not grow on trees, and it carries weight. But really, one did here.

Sir Peter Ogden was educated at Rochdale Grammar School and, in 2014, the company he co-founded, Dealogic, was sold for £440m. He stepped in at the last minute in May 2024 after hearing about the emergency situation and, along with his son Cameron, vowed to rebuild the club.

Being financially self-sufficient, the ultimate vision, is as hard as ever in a league where Gauge estimates revenues drop 96 per cent from the EFL. The initial aim was to re-engage the club with its community by investing in infrastructure to make Spotland a community provider.

In the back of the Willbutts Lane Stand, where the Borehamwood supporters have room to spread out, is a non-for-profit alternate provision school that will offer education to 100 children who have fallen out of the curriculum.

A community hub

The passion is in education and huge sums have been invested in the club’s community trust. You see the lineage here: be a home for the community and the community will pay it back through their affinity with the club. Rochdale AFC becomes an intrinsic part of Rochdale again.

Obvious statement: money also makes everything else easier, too. There has been investment in data analysis, in a larger staff, in a new pitch, in a technical style that creates greater loan opportunities and in two and three-year contracts for players that allows greater retention and allows playing assets to hold value.

Manager Jimmy McNulty was supported and has delivered beyond most expectations this season.

“They are shaping the club in how they want a football club to be,” Gauge says.

“You can’t help but get bitten by the on-pitch stuff, but there is a social aspect to it that they’re really keen on, and it’s great to see. It’s trying to get local people outside of council and politicians to take control of their own destiny in the town, and get behind various projects.

“They want to do it through education and via lots and lots of projects. We wouldn’t be able to run how we run now without their money, but that’s just a small part of it: their vision is for the whole of Rochdale. They’re definitely in it for the long haul; they want to see social change in this town.”

That is the juggling act here. Nobody can know where this season will end. There is a determination to get back into the Football League as soon as possible but there are a clutch of former EFL clubs who believe in the same goal and only one automatic promotion slot. For now, supporters will simply enjoy having a team that once again reflects their club; this time for the better.

But all the while, there is also a growing permanence to the place now. Things are happening. Someone has an idea of how to make life better for other people and it can become action rather than exist as a half-formed, financially unviable dream.

That creates its own form of sustainability. A club has been rebuilt, a team has been reborn and a community is being re-engaged for the good of all. This is the good stuff.

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Pep Guardiola unmoored is a beautiful thing, raising in some the idea that his emotional outpouring over the innocent victims of global conflicts could point to a premature parting with Manchester City at the end of the season.

When the influential and powerful raise their voice, commotion ripples through the ether. Goodness knows the downtrodden need all the help they can get.

With Pep on their side, the people of Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, anti-government protestors in the United States, all referenced in Guardiola’s remarkable press conference about a football match, are at least seen, their complaints heard, their anguish acknowledged.

“Never, ever in the history of humanity have we had the information in front of our eyes more clearly than now. The genocide in Palestine, what happened in Ukraine, what happened in Russia, what happened all around the world, in Sudan, everywhere. Do you want to see it? It’s our problem as human beings,” he said.

“Is there someone here who is not affected every single day? For me, it hurts me. If it was the opposite side, it would hurt me. Killing thousands of innocent people, it hurts me. It’s no more complicated than that. I have a lot of friends from many, many countries, but when you have an idea and you need to defend, and you have to kill thousands of people, I’m sorry, I will stand up.”

"When thousands of innocent people are completely killed it hurts me!"

"Humanity is better than ever in terms of possibilities. We can do everything. But still, right now, we kill each other. For what?!"

Pep Guardiola delivers hugely passionate speech on the power of images and… pic.twitter.com/EJ3AQmZmmU

— Hayters TV (@HaytersTV) February 3, 2026

Well said, Pep. However, speaking up in this way also raises the spectre of justifiable whataboutery, so forgive me if I highlight the contradictions here, and there are many.

Were Guardiola to have spoken out in Abu Dhabi, home of City’s ownership, as he did before the Carabao Cup semi-final, for example, he might have been subject to criminal investigation and likely expulsion.

A cursory glance at Amnesty International’s commentary reveals how freedom of expression is curtailed by the heavy-duty application of the United Arab Emirates’ legal apparatus. For example, a Palestinian academic was deported in April last year after sharing his political views with colleagues at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus.

The following month a foreign student was arrested and deported for shouting “Free Palestine” at an NYU graduation ceremony.

You can imagine how Pep’s volley at the Etihad might have been perceived by City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the UAE representative no less on Donald Trump’s questionable vanity project launched in Davos last month, the fantastical “Board of Peace”.

Al Mubarak has already been pinned by the Jewish Representative Council over Guardiola’s remarks at a charity concert he addressed in Barcelona last month wearing the keffiyeh scarf, the universal symbol of Palestinian resistance.

Moreover, the UAE is involved in the conflict in Sudan as a significant backer of the rebel paramilitary group RSF (Rapid Support Forces), which for two years has been locked in a deadly power battle with the ruling SAF (Sudan Armed Forces). The latter accuses the UAE of being complicit in genocide, which if course the UAE, a heavy importer of the gold controlled by the RSF, rejects.

Separating right from wrong in complex, internecine struggles rooted not in principles but power and control is the devil’s own work. It is perhaps as well that Guardiola made no mention of Yemen, where, as a supporter of the separatist group STC (Southern Transactional Council), the UAE had boots on the ground until 2019 and has since maintained proxy support in a brutal civil war that has ravaged communities.

Guardiola cannot be held accountable for the foreign policy of his club’s owners, but if his heart strings are sufficiently plucked by interminable conflicts that claim innocent lives he might do well to peer through the emotional mist to establish a clearer understanding of global events and the forces involved.

Or, as some are suggesting, it might be that Guardiola does not care, that he has gone nuclear knowing that the end is nigh, that his departure is decided and he has nothing to lose. Guardiola will know the power of his voice, how anything he says is grist to the social media mill and open to wild interpretation.

How’s this for an hysterical link? Guardiola has been resolute in his support for the Abu Dhabi ownership in the case brought by the Premier League against Manchester City, which resulted in 130 charges relating to alleged financial irregularities, all denied by the club.

We still await the outcome of a hearing that convened for two months at the end of 2024. Perhaps Guardiola knows something we don’t. The question will be asked.

Either way the needle has been moved. Pep has spoken and is now fair game having entered the same geopolitical realm that saw Abu Dhabi buy City in the first place, not for the connection to east Manchester, nor for the love of football, but for the soft power clout that association with the world game brings.

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It is not the anger that really sticks with you at the King Power Stadium, nor the sadness or angst. It is not the groans and boos or the catcalls against sporting director Jon Rudkin or the style of play.

It is the silence; long periods of ghostly nothingness where something used to exist because everybody has forgotten what it is like to watch a team that they are proud of. They trudge in, fearing the worst, and too often trudge away dissecting it. There are roars before the match, but only out of habit really. They soon dissipate into an air of displeasure.

You can see why; you can hardly blame anyone present for the misery. Five years ago this week, Leicester City were third in the Premier League, five points off the top and 11 points ahead of Arsenal. No club in England has fallen from such a height to where Leicester are now. The silence reflects the disbelief at the breadth and length of the decline.

Last week, owner Aiyawatt “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha gave his first sit down interview in years to a number of journalists. The timing was predictable, given the latest on-pitch nadir and the sacking of manager Marti Cifuentes.

In amongst the typical soundbites about taking responsibility, needing to fight and focusing on making better decisions, almost all of which has been evident for three years, Top said that he was still baffled by how Leicester got relegated.

It was a worrying thing to hear from supporters, because they could all tell Topp: a powder puff midfield and a leaky defence; illogical managerial appointments; gross wastage on players despite financial limitations; failing to keep a clean sheet away from home and only scoring 15 times at home. That will do it. 

In the same interview, Top responded to the sustained criticism of Rudkin’s work by insisting that there should not be a culture of blame and revealing that Rudkin would be moving further up the food chain with a new sporting director on the way.

But why shouldn’t there be blame? This is a supposedly elite football club, not a school sports day. If systemic issues have been identified and a series of significant mistakes made that have undermined previous progress and doubled down on decline, it is not enough to say “We will do better” without evidence that the root causes of that decline are addressed. 

Leicester spent money so badly – on transfer fees and wages – that it caused them to fail profitability and sustainability rules. They are a bottom-half Championship club with two £15m-plus signings out on loan and another six in a first-team squad that is still light on depth in key areas. Their last three managerial appointments, in order, did not fit the club (Steve Cooper), never had the experience for the task (Ruud van Nistelrooy) and were never likely to implement their style with the squad inherited (Cifuentes).

If there is too little accountability within the club’s management, do not act surprised when the same happens on the pitch. Leicester have forgotten how to win games, forgotten how to show fight and steel and forgotten how to defend without making daft mistakes. The third worst defence in the Premier League last year is the third worst in the Championship this year.

The financial limitations have clearly hit hard here; the only route out of the strife is through sustainability and the Championship is hardly its natural habitat. But it is the continued threat of points deduction, Leicester’s own sword of Damocles, that creates the most reason for fear.

Leicester’s argument, although effective, that they existed in a hinterland between Premier League and EFL and therefore that any punishment could not be applied, has become counterproductive. The Foxes are living in a scenario where their league position is false and the eventual punishment not yet confirmed; neither is its timing. Were it to be nine points, say, Leicester would be in the bottom three.

And so now longer-term good intentions meet with understandable short-term panic. Andy King has taken over as caretaker, but lost 2-0 at home to Charlton Athletic in his first game. Leicester supporters are desperate to see meaningful change but the only noticeable shift is their team getting worse and worse. 

Uncertainty is the whole of their truth: Leicester need a new manager, sporting director, chief executive, commercial director. They need to know what their punishment will be for past failings and need to know if that places them in a battle to go up or a battle to stay up. You can have a decent stadium, a wealthy owner, a sizeable fanbase in a one-club city and recent success. None of it provides a VIP pass to jump the queue to avoid calamity.

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Arsenal 1-0 Chelsea (4-2 on aggregate) (Havertz 90+7)

EMIRATES STADIUM – Being generous, encounters like this are described as a “chess match”. The trouble is not many people turn up in the torrential rain to watch live games of chess, with good reason.

That will not worry Mikel Arteta, who finally banished one of his great hoodoos – winning a semi-final at the fifth attempt as Kai Havertz’s stoppage-time winner sent Arsenal to Wembley.

They are a team of contradictions – so controlled and hyper-fixated on precision that they forget to bother with aesthetics. Too hysterical to win trophies and yet seemingly devoid of the normal emotions that accompany the biggest occasions.

It should alarm Liam Rosenior more, one of the brightest coaching prospects in England. For a window into the mindset of the modern manager, you could not have hoped for a better showdown than the one here. It was like watching a couple of data deities for the kind of football fans who enjoy expected goal metrics more than actual goals, slowly rearranging the pawns from the dugout.

"I'm surprised people have done it more."

Ian Wright and Karen Carney on how Chelsea have dealt with Arsenal's corners #ITVFootball | @Carabao_Cup pic.twitter.com/rsY1vOuh6R

— ITV Football (@itvfootball) February 3, 2026

If Arsenal are robotic, they are also uber-professional. Rosenior, by contrast, seemed to lose sight of what Chelsea were there to do, arriving at the Emirates with a one-goal deficit. They went conservative when there was nothing to conserve. Reece James and Pedro Neto were absent and Estevao and Cole Palmer could only start on the bench.

But likewise Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard were missing too. This was no vintage Arsenal performance. In the first half, Viktor Gyokeres was restricted to just three touches. There were the familiar struggles from open play; indeed the most interesting thing Chelsea did in 90 minutes was a sudden rush to take three players out of the box as Arsenal prepared a corner, ensuring their hosts had to do the same.

There has been so much to like about Rosenior’s early work at Stamford Bridge, the dramatic comebacks against Napoli and West Ham, and there are mitigating factors. There is still not enough depth in that defence and it looked nervous on the night. In practice it was a back five and the transitions were not effective enough. Upon the hour mark on went Estevao and Palmer and Alejandro Garnacho soon joined, but it was too late once the life had already been sapped out of the tie.

Garnacho has required some bold handling. In the first leg, he was the only reason Chelsea remained in the tie with two goals, but his role in the two they conceded against West Ham was enough to see him hauled off at half-time. It cost him a starting role in north London, Rosenior’s firmest hand towards a Chelsea player so far. Given the repeated question marks over discipline under Enzo Maresca, that is no bad thing.

Teams have to change and evolve but Rosenior does not enjoy the same luxuries as Arteta. The latter can insist that, contrary to the naked eye, they are in fact “the most exciting team in Europe”, rebutting Paul Scholes’ claim that we are about to witness “the most boring team to win the Premier League”. And he can say that because Arsenal are even closer to silverware now as they head to Wembley.

Instead Chelsea emulated Arsenal’s worst traits without delivering the best ones, finishing with an xG of 0.68. They looked reticent, overawed and stagnant. It is the first time since replacing Maresca Rosenior has really fallen into such an obvious trap.

Paul Merson delivered the most scathing critique of the night, saying he was “flabbergasted” by Rosenior’s approach.

“I can’t believe what I’ve just watched,” he told Sky Sports. “Chelsea aren’t a bottom-five team. They have World Cup winners. “[Wesley] Fofana is crying. He should be crying because they never had a go. They’ve gone out with a whimper in a semi-final.”

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For a plausibly bright bloke Gianni Infantino is impressively dim, taking us all for fools with his brazen sycophancy. A primary school ethics class would have little trouble weeding out the fallacies and contradictions in the Fifa president’s inane proclamations, the latest of which calls for the lifting of the ban prohibiting Russia from playing international football.

We should not, according to Infantino, “ban any country from playing football because of the acts of their political leaders”. We see you Infantino. The knee bend before Russian president Vladimir Putin is as clear an example of fawning over power as the award of a Fifa peace prize to Donald Trump, which of course gave the big, fat lie to the separation of sport and politics.

It is so far beyond parody to reward the Russian state with inclusion four years after it launched an illegal invasion of a sovereign neighbour, it does not deserve the consideration of mutant ninja turtles let alone salient human beings. Not only does it insult the intelligence of right thinking souls, it offends the victims of Russian murderous aggression in Ukraine, the war dead, military and civilian, the casualties and the displaced among the near 38 million population.

Infantino knows this, of course, but can’t help himself. Whether it be a direct siren call to Putin or at the bidding of Trump, his faux separation of sport and state is an appalling act of opportunism and appeasement that should be called out and was by Ukrainian sports minister Matvii Bidnyi, who described his comments as “irresponsible not to say infantile. They detach football from the reality in which children are being killed.”

The ban, according to “Infantilo”, has achieved nothing, other than contributing more “frustration and hatred”. So we welcome the Russians back into Infantino’s world and skip along holding hands while Putin continues his monstrous imperialist drive to make Ukraine Russian again.

“Having girls and boys from Russia being able to play football games in other parts of Europe would help.” If only someone had thought of this before. We could have brought Adolf Hitler to his senses, persuaded Joseph Stalin gulags were not the way, helped South Africa’s leaders understand the folly of apartheid, because no matter how brutal the regime, the beautiful game has a way of making us whole again. Ye gods.

What is really happening here is the appropriation of the world game by its most powerful figure for the purpose of personal aggrandisement. Infantino is a conceited, vainglorious, fool, who believes the world leaders to whom he kow-tows actually value and admire him. That he might be their useful idiot, allowing them to use the world’s biggest sporting event as a propaganda tool, has not crossed his tiny mind.

How could it? He is too absorbed by the man he sees in the mirror. He loves the power his post affords him, mistaking that for what he believes are inherent qualities of his own. Big Gianni energy. God I’m so f***ing impressive, everybody worth a dime wants me at his table, the maker of men, the god of all things.

Trump would not touch Infantino with a goal post were he not Fifa head boy. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would not wipe his feet on that polished cranium were Infantino not accelerating the normalisation of Saudi Arabia via the gift of the 2034 World Cup.

It was never you, Infantino. Your obsequious tokens of affection, the bizarre Fifa “peace prize”, the smug self-importance, all expose you for the absurd vassal you are, an inconsequential lickspittle masquerading as substance.   

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