Hollow Victory: How the Club World Cup Trophy Mirrors the Modern Game

The trophy for the FIFA Club World Cup is a startlingly strange sight. 

It starts as a flat disc and unlocks into a constellation of glimmering, golden concentric circles that spin around a central plate. The vermeil bands and the plate are laser-engraved with text and imagery that “pays homage to the beautiful game’s global legacy and celebrates its champions”. Ahead of the tournament, the trophy (designed by Tiffany & Co.) had its own tour and even met the President. 

It would appear that much of the trophy’s inspiration was drawn from the Voyager Golden Records; they too were gold-plated and inscribed (filled instead with basic sounds and images to communicate the diversity of life and culture on Earth). 

Today, while the records hurtle through interstellar space more than 24 billion miles away, FIFA’s trophy sits motionless, one guesses, in some New York City vault ahead of Sunday’s final. 

Still, it is meant to be a grand trophy, a bombastic one, different from the steady, stocky trophies strewn throughout football history: those blunt, inert masses. It will certainly be a sight to see how the tournament’s victors heft this one above their heads in celebration.

That victor will be either a private equity-backed club or a state-backed soft-power project. And while FIFA have done much to tout this tournament as one for clubs and fans worldwide, it cannot hide the shifts in modern football that this tournament and itself have ushered in. 

The Club World Cup feels like a rubicon crossed. The awe, the inspiration, the feats of heroism, daring and human drama, which for eons has fed sports, feels thinned. In its place stands something else: a spinning, untouching mass, gilded into place and inscribed with gestures to greatness that ring increasingly hollow.

Perhaps it heralds sport’s Gilded Age where football becomes a plaything for sovereign funds, multibillion-dollar valuations, autocrats and would-be kings. 

In this age, it’s fitting that FIFA’s trophy can only be opened with a key. Unlocked, one is reminded of those classical atomic structures - electrons whizzing around a nucleus on fixed tracks. Funny, then, to think that atoms are mostly empty space.