Fifa's roadmap

Day -609. WorldCup2018

I read Fifa's website regularly to keep up to date with any announcements from Fifa regarding the World Cup, or any other minor football news. If anything major has happened I have usually already read about it somewhere else. And, in the past, there were many football news stories which were about Fifa and not reported by Fifa anyway.

So I was a little surprised today when I read on Fifa.com about the launch of Fifa’s new roadmap: “FIFA 2.0: The Vision for the Future". As I normally am I was online quite a lot today and never saw this reported anywhere else. As a matter of interest I searched through the websites of a few British newspapers and BBC. A few of them had no mention of it. The BBC had it under a story, amongst others, of Diego Maradona having an argument with Juan Sebastian Veron at the Match for Peace. 

The newspapers that did report on Fifa's vision gave it less importance than a new manager taking over a second division team (Aston Villa) and the offer to a has been player (Agbonlahor) to reclaim his place in the Villa team, and Gordon Strachan's non-resignation as Scotland manager.

My feeling is that nobody really has much time for Fifa and it's grand plans until they actually do something. The one bit of news that the newspapers did pick up on is President Infantino's reiteration at the Fifa Council of his wish for a 40 or 48 team World Cup. He says there is positive reaction. Nobody reporting on it seems to think so. A decision will be made in January.

In a nutshell, Fifa’s plan is to give each member association $1.25m over 4 years (up from $400,000), have 60% of the world participating in football, double the amount of female footballers to 60 million and take over more of the operation of business services that Fifa can generate revenue from such as ticketing for World Cups.

More will follow as Fifa embark on implementing all of this. And then it will be in all the newspapers.