You would have thought that there was only so much football that could be crammed into the year, wouldn’t you?

But it seems not. Fifa, that noted home of sporting rectitude, has plans to launch a global club competition, this one backed by Saudi Arabian money, channelled through Japan’s SoftBank.

Whether it gets off the ground remains to be seen, but given Saudi Arabia’s present world standing, you would hope it would be hoofed into Row Z. But what interested me about the mooted tournament was it was described as an example of “sports-washing”, whereby questionable countries use sport to buff and hone their image and so be cast in a more favourable light.

Not that this exercise has a particularly noble history. Think of perhaps the first example – the 1936 Berlin Olympics or the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Consider also the Bahrain grand prix or the one in Azerbaijan. But no amount of expensive cars whizzing around circuits in Bahrain or Azerbaijan can obscure their appalling records on human rights. As for Russia… So sports-washing is an interesting concept, but one that is ultimately doomed to fail.

Returning to Saudi Arabia for a moment. I thought Donald Trump outdid himself when he boomed: “They had a very bad original concept… the cover-up was one of the worst cover-ups in the history of cover-ups.”

Eh? A journalist has been barbarously murdered and the most heinous thing to Trump is that the Saudis made a complete cock-up of getting their story straight. Mind you, after Salisbury, perhaps the Saudis, like the Russians, could do with a crash course in “excuse-washing”.

• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist