Fifa World Cup sale stinks. If Infantino gets his way, how long before we’re scoring ‘Googoals’ through Golden Arches?

THE date is December 25, 2043, and it’s all eyes on Dubai’s new 500,000- seat Dragon Oil Stadium for the American Express Soccer World Series Final. The JP Morgan Pre-Match Extravaganza is reaching its climax as Sir Harry Styles performs UAE 2043’s official song, “Fifa Dream”, to a packed audience of tech bros and oligarchs. Fifa’s megalomaniac boss Gianni Infantino has conjured up another money-grabbing ruse Credit: Getty The World Cup has already been stretched to near-breaking point with a record 48 teams competing this year in front of fans paying an average (and another record) of $1,600 a ticket Credit: Getty Then out sprints Team Walmart USA on to the perfectly manicured crimson pitch with the now-familiar Golden Arch™ goals. Coach Barron Trump’s boys are looking to secure their ninth back-to-back win since the tournament became an annual event. But they face stiff competition from their opponents, Tata India, who are determined their $25million “final facility fee” will prove to be a sound investment. And the whistle blows . . . the first eighth is officially under way. Yes, OK, I can hear you, “enough of this nonsense!” Well, nonsense it may sound today. But if Fifa gets its way, this ludicrous prophecy could become a reality. Because the World Cup is for sale folks. Not content with squeezing every last red cent out of this year’s event through Powerade-sponsored hydration breaks and ticket prices that even the billionaire Donald Trump said were too high, Fifa’s megalomaniac boss Gianni Infantino has conjured up another money-grabbing ruse. Now he wants to “unleash the commercial potential” of the game by selling stakes in Fifa tournaments through a new company that might well net this mercenary maniac tens of millions. Business brains will say, so what? Football is already highly commercialised (Fifa made a record £11billion from this year’s cup) so what difference will some extra cash make? Well, a lot of difference is what. The more “partners” get involved in something, the more they will bend it to suit their own agendas. We saw it at this World Cup when the main host nation, USA, was, incredibly, able to dictate how it was played. Donald Trump’s devious demand that USA striker Folarin Balogun’s red card be overturned was not a desperate plea from a friend of Fifa — which would have been bad enough — but an order from an important client nation. Whether there was anything in the small print for this unprecedented favour we may never know. One proposed investor is Joshua Kushner — a younger brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner Credit: Getty Infantino cannot be allowed to get away with this Credit: Getty But the fact the person apparently assisting Infantino’s latest cynical scheme is one Joshua Kushner, brother of Trump’s son-law Jared Kushner, perhaps gives us a clue. The whole thing stinks. The World Cup has already been stretched to near-breaking point with a record 48 teams competing this year in front of fans paying an average (and another record) of $1,600 a ticket, five times that of Qatar 2022. Fifa is now exploring upping that to 64. Hell, why not go further and make it every country on the planet? And while we’re at it, let’s run it every couple of years instead of four (another thing Fifa has already considered, licking its lips at the expected £3.3billion extra it would make). Hang the consequences for the domestic leagues, just think of all those tickets you could sell. Kerching! And don’t kid yourself that some of the ridiculous scenarios I laid out earlier won’t happen. I pluck these ideas not just from the more fanciful corners of my mind but from the kind of commercialised crimes that are already happening in sport. Like in cricket, where even the method of scoring was up for grabs for the greedy Indian Premier League. After securing a huge sponsorship deal with Indian real estate giant DLF, out went the age-old “SIX!” for anyone smashing the ball over the boundary and in came the “DLF Maximum”, which commentators were contractualy obliged to use. How long before a goal becomes an “Aramco Addition” or a “Googoal”? Like the junked European Super League before it, a more commercially driven World Cup will be an anti-fan embarrassment that merely accelerates the death of the beautiful game as we know and love it.Infantino cannot be allowed to get away with this. I’m glad Uefa has kicked off, saying his indecent proposal “crosses a line . . . the soul and governance of football are not assets to trade”. It does. The FA and our new footie-mad PM Andy Burnham have also expressed concerns. Even the disgraced ex-Fifa gangster Sepp Blatter thinks it’s “deeply damaging”. European footballing nations absolutely should boycott this avaricious atrocity. And they should not stand alone. It is vital that all national football associations show Infantino an immediate red card. UNFAIR CASH GRAB ANDY BURNHAM is spending a lot of cash, isn’t he? Bus-fare caps, leccy discounts, beds for the homeless. He’s like my daughter whenever she’s in Superdug – never knowingly leaves in the black. So obviously the big question is, how’s he going to pay for these people-pleasing perks? Well this week we got a good idea. He’s gonna rob our graves. Not literally, of course. But The Grim Up North Reaper wants the state to take ten per cent of everything we leave behind the second we pop our clogs. It’s a classic socialist cash grab, which means it is also deeply unfair. Why the hell should the state take a guaranteed slice of everything you’ve bought and paid for (and paid taxes on) all your life? It’s getting to the point where the Government is just conjuring up ways to tax us for every damn thing it can think of. Who the hell is running the Treasury, Ryanair? Big finish from Dr Death Gunther von Hagens has died aged 81 Credit: Shutterstock Editorial GUNTHER von Hagens, the bonkers “Dr Death” whose macabre Body Worlds exhibitions of dissected corpses shocked and delighted everyone in the early Noughties, died last week. That’s gonna be one hell of an open casket. NIQAB ABUSE NOT ON LOTS of folk getting all hot and bothered because someone in a niqab was given a community prize for helping young girls get into sport. Khadija Patel won a British Citizen Award in her home town of Bolton and no sooner had her picture appeared online, the hate began. Reading her story, she seems like a good egg, doing her bit to help in a country where most people do bugger all for others I get that niqabs and the like don’t seem very “empowering” for the women they hide. But cricket-mad Khadija isn’t telling the girls at her youth club to dress like her, just to play sport, something banned for women by hardliners like the Taliban. I’d much rather have big-hearted people such as Khadija around than some of the islamophobic trolls ripping her to shreds. LOUISA A WED CASE Louisa Warren has decided to marry herself after becoming fed-up with men Credit: Supplied SOME doolally woman has become the latest show-off to marry HERSELF.Louisa Warren, from Manchester, claims she was fed up with all the gym junkies she was pulling just shagging her and then immediately dumping her. So she decided to jump on a plane all the way to Las Vegas for a spot of sologamy, as this act of extreme narcissism is known. There she was in an empty chapel in her cheap dress promising to honour and obey herself as some cynical celebrant rinsed her of $100. We know this all happened because the first rule of marrying yourself seems to be that you must further debase yourself by selling your “story” to someone silly gullible enough to believe it. And who says, er, autoromance is dead? The Guardian’s correction for their ‘perfect summer cocktail’ MIND how you go if you’re using The Guardian’s tips on creating the perfect summer cocktail. A recent recipe was so packed with booze it would have put hairs on the chest of the late Ollie Reed. Alas, it was a concoction too powerful to be true as this embarrassing correction was forced to admit. IT’S a measure of how far down the celebrity snakes and ladders board Holly Willoughby has slid that the first guest on her new YouTube Show was the ubiquitous Stanley Tucci. Could her star power not have snared someone a bit more A-list for the heavily hyped debut? Well, guests come and go and as the show goes on, the likeable Holly will hopefully find someone less pleased with themselves to bounce her random observations off. My main problem with this first episode was its insistence that almost everything in the in-explicably dimly lit set – including Holly – was an insipid shade of what I’d imagine Farrow & Ball would call “Farmed Salmon”. It made for a dull debut and confirmed that Holly Willoughby Together is very much an idea in search of a lightbulb moment.