When Jack Skellington grew tired of organizing Halloween Town’s Halloween celebration in Disney’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, the ghost skeleton proceeded to plot and scheme over how he could take charge of Christmas as well. Unable to understand the spirit of the holiday and personally impulsive to a fault, Jack almost ruined Christmas for everyone.
One has to imagine Gianni Infantino, alone in his high tower at FIFA HQ, feeling similarly weary of his role as president of FIFA, presiding over a 32-team World Cup again and again. So Infantino is scheming of ways to destroy the World Cup.
Gianni Infantino thinking about ruining the World Cup. Photo: @OhMyDisney | Twitter
Somewhere deep inside of his bones, an emptiness began to grow. The World Cup, the greatest and most enjoyable sporting event on the planet, needs to change — or so says Infantino.
So he put forward the idea of a 48-team World Cup where, follow along now, 16 seeded teams would earn byes, sentencing the remaining 32 teams to an elimination playoff that would then proceed to a 32-team group stage. Wouldn’t that be f****** awesome?! This is basically the part in The Nightmare Before Christmas where Santa Claus is kidnapped and shoved into a bag.
Not content to stop there, Infantino now backs the idea of 48 teams being put into 16 groups of three, each playing at least two matches. Does that mean that the first-place teams would advance to a 16-team knockout stage? Or that the two top teams from each group would advance to a 32-team knockout stage? Who knows — Infantino doesn’t know. He's just impulsive and making it up as he goes along.
This is basically the part in the film where Jack starts gifting terrifying presents to little children, mortifying them for life with an unhinged plan that ruins everything.
Thankfully, Infantino’s desires need to be adopted by the whole of FIFA before they could ever go into effect, thus ensuring that…s***, this is going to happen, isn’t it?
(H/T: The Guardian)
