Uncontested: Dazn's story reveals game's grim future

Saudi-backed streaming superpower's broadcasting deal for Gianni Infantino's Club World Cup is the next expansionist step towards a world super league

- Barney Ronay

And what exactly are you doing here, sir?

To be fair, the border guard at Miami international airport made an excellent point. As ice-breakers go, frowning over the passports and visa tickers of the long-haul crowd on matchday minus four of the FIFA Club World Cup, the border guard was at least in tune with the zeitgeist. What is football doing here?

What are Lionel Messi, Trent Alexander-Arnold and the massed engines of the football-industrial complex doing hovering like an alien landing party over this fun, sinking sandbank of a city, a strip of land where the ocean seems to be punching a mulchy green hole in the asphalt every few miles, a place that from the air seems to be made entirely from deep-fried crumb, tropical weed and traffic?

And yes, the FIFA Club World Cup is only partly here at this point, glimpsed on highway billboards that also promote accident-chasing lawyers called things such as Chuck Flip-Burger III, still to emerge from the endless noise of the US's rolling leisure economy. But it is still an excellent question that deserves a proper answer.

Even the strangely literal-minded obsession with the trophy itself seems to admit to the vacant space at the heart of this thing. Never mind the basic sense of apathy. Here is a magnificent sinister golden plate that, at the turn of a key, can be transformed into a magnificent sinister golden sphere. Here is a trophy that seems to lurk, to tick and hum and buzz, that looks as if it almost certainly houses sinister things in its secret drawers - stolen moon rock, the head of a pigeon.

The question of what football is doing here is even present in the Club World Cup marketing. Dazn, FIFA's broadcast partner, is billing its breakthrough global event with the tagline Uncontested. It's a good word, meaning ultimate, the best; but also with a sense of something unmoored, floating out beyond any real sense of accountability.