Infantino is doing everything he can to undermine him, but football still knows how to silence the loudmouths

I appreciate football because – in addition to providing an excellent pretext for socializing with colleagues – it tends to reveal the innermost thoughts of those who comment on it, and passes definitive judgements even when the evidence against is still very limited. I am not referring to England v Argentina, of course, given that as I write this article there are still several hours to go before kick-off, and I am already tired of articles about "the ghost of Maradona lending a hand to Scaloni", photos of Messi giving baby Yamal a bath, and interviews with Falkland Islanders who, naturally, are supporting England. I am referring to those who, for days on end, assured us that there was nothing in the world stronger than France, and that Mbappé and his team-mates would win the World Cup in their slippers – or rather, in sandals and lêkê. Instead, it was Spain who made it to the final, and already they’re slicing up the sausage and scrambling the eggs over the victory of the team rather than the individuals, and over the superiority of the group over the individual brilliance of the stars (all this after spending the last month extolling the individual stars of every national team).

In fact, if a football fan were to purchase a shirt featuring a Spanish player – apart from Yamal, who is, in any case, having a World Cup that’s little more than decent – who would they select? Oyarzabal and Pedro Porro, with those names that sound like nursery rhymes? Or the one with the surname that sounds like a summer group dance, Cucurella?

Spain are a dangerous side, and perhaps it is precisely because they lack any truly big names that they have been able to progress discreetly through the World Cup – thanks to a bit of luck and a defence as rock-solid as certain backsides you see in Menorca – without anyone boring us with the records of this or that player, until we realised they hadn’t conceded a goal in ages.

I must admit that France surprised even me; I didn’t expect to see them so out of sorts in the semi-final, but the unpredictability of performances is one of the few good things left in a sport that Infantino has been running into the ground for far too long. While the final has yet to be played (and I do not even consider the farce of the third-place play-off), it is clear that the new rules introduced by FIFA in this World Cup have been an embarrassing flop: too many obscure changes, too many ambiguous cases, too many incompetent referees and too many instances where the application of the rules was based on the referee’s whim – in most cases, some random bloke from a country where they’ve yet to discover football.