Afterword

As we sit around the table and talk through the journey of the book and sign off the last chapters, the sports news flashes through social media and we are reminded that today is a relatively important one. We check the time, it is 9:30 a.m. on a chilly Autumn morning in Birmingham, UK. It is 30 September 2021, quite an uneventful day, but in the football world, today is no ordinary day. Indeed, bubbling under the surface, this ordinary day has the power to change the course of football history. Today has global significance, as Arsene Wenger an astute mind and esteemed servant of the game, puts forward an FIFA constitutional plan to layout a roadmap for a bi-annual World Cup, which would end an unbreakable convention of a World Cup tournament that has always been on a four-yearly cycle. As with breaking with any habitual norm, there is tension or what psychologist Leon Festinger terms cognitive dissonance. There is vehement opposition to the plans. But there is more at stake here than Festinger's idea of uneasiness of inconsistent beliefs, there is a global political power game that is threatening to split football down the centre.