Some movies are so bad they kill more than themselves. Sometimes, they kill a series. As George Clooney wryly (and rightly) observed after Batman & Robin: “I think we might have killed the franchise.” Occasionally, a movie is such a disaster it kills an entire genre. The monstrous excesses of Cleopatra fatally wounded the swords‑and-sandals epic genre, and the flop of The Fall of the Roman Empire a year later finished it off so thoroughly that it didn’t return for decades. Heaven’s Gate is famously the film that didn’t just collapse a studio (United Artists), but made big-budget westerns a no-go. Some have even accused Michael Cimino’s epic of killing the 1970s, an amusingly outlandish charge for which we’ll just have to coin the term epochicide.

Much less amusingly, alas, we must return once more to Fifa, and inquire: franchise killer or genre killer? In which metaphorical category would you place president Gianni Infantino’s plan for a 48-team World Cup?

Gianni Infantino unveils plans to increase World Cup to 40 or 48 teams Read more

Chances are you’d hoped Fifa would have spent their latest conclave in rigorous self-examination, what with some former executives still being on the run from the FBI, others awaiting extradition proceedings, and the entire organisation still a global byword for hideous greed and corruption. But so what? At last week’s meeting of Infantino’s expanded Fifa Council – the world’s best attended displacement activity – there was instead much discussion of the proposal to bulk up football’s flagship tournament to 40 or 48 teams. Look, it may not be the Fifa reform you want, but for Infantino it’s the Fifa reform you need.

Of course, those who still feel that the World Cup’s expansion from 16 to 32 teams between 1982 and 1998 denuded the competition of a certain high-end glamour may already be opening the pedal bin marked “genre killer”. Others may wish for more information. Should Fifa go for the 48-team option, then, there is clearly much debate as to how the tournament would be constructed and located, but the idea of two concurrent group stages is fairly unavoidable. If only 16 progress to the knockout stages, as now, the tournament will comprise 88 games. If 32 go through, the World Cup will run to 104 games.

If there is anyone bar an army of Swiss bank managers who honestly regards this as a plan that will improve the tournament, I am sure Infantino would love to hear from them. Meanwhile, he is forced to rely on his own justifications, and it is fair to say these tend toward the boggling.

Indeed, to hear Gianni talk is to feel that in many ways the very notion of sport itself is holding the World Cup back. What is sport, if not exclusionary in the most outmoded sort of way? Infantino was at pains to stress that qualifying for a World Cup induced “football euphoria” in the countries that do, and to that end was obviously to be encouraged. Not qualifying, he said, was awful for a country, and turned its football clubs into “a disaster”.

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Mmm. This is starting to feel slightly like the sort of World Cup my mother might design: one where everyone can join in and win a prize. Bless her – she’s an extremely kind person – but no. The further we go down this route, the closer we get to the idea that it is not the winning but the qualifying. And at some point the very notion of sporting competition itself becomes a barrier to the ultimate aim, which is a suspiciously lucrative stripe of inclusivity. We might as well start radically mitigating the upset people feel when one team have to lose a football match.

Were we in the realms of fiction, justice would prevail. You may have seen the South Park episode where Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are ultimately arrested for raping their own creation in the unspeakable Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. (Furthermore, at the very moment the police apprehend him, Lucas is engaged in the metaphorical raping of Star Wars, via the actual rape of a Stormtrooper.) The pair protest loudly about how much money this stuff makes at the box office. Indeed, some of the smaller nations – forgive me – the smaller characters, such as Butters think there is nothing wrong with it. But as all right-thinking moviegoers know, there is something very wrong indeed with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Though not quite as much – amazingly – as there is with a 48-team World Cup.

Football Manager stays ahead of the game

Further laurels for the creators of Football Manager, who are the latest entity in British public life to hint at more sophisticated Brexit thinking than Liam Fox.

In a fascinating interview with the Daily Telegraph, Sports Interactive’s boss Miles Jacobson revealed that next year’s 17th iteration of the game will include three Brexit scenarios and timetables, of which hard Brexit will obviously most affect gameplay. According to Jacobson, the creators “have included every possible outcome in the game, using artificial intelligence and percentage chances to make every game different … If people think the outcome is bleak, this is what I believe will happen.” As he points out: “Preparing for the Brexit aspect of the new game has taken a lot of research, too: a lot of reading, a lot of talking to politicians and people in football.”

This feels confusing. As the victorious Brexiteers have spent much of the past three months telling us all, preparing for Brexit was the job of their Whitehall predecessors. Their failure to do it means that those now in charge of leading the process have to make terrifyingly empty speeches once a week, until some sort of clue is got. For a video game to appear ahead of them on this front is another one for the notional committee on unpatriotic activities, which we can only hope will be convened IRL without delay.