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View image in fullscreen£10m for a month of Alexander-Arnold exposes absurdity of Club World Cup

The first piece of mini-transfer window business is a significant moment for Fifa’s Gianni Infantino and his heinous creation

Hmm.

How much un-booing does £10m get you, in a highly emotive run?your?contract-down local?lad?departure scenario?

This and many more equally strange questions will presumably have to be debated now Real Madrid have agreed a small but significant early release payment for Trent Alexander-Arnold, which will in turn allow his participation at the most heinous footballing entity yet devised, the new Fifa Club World Cup.

Champions League final the calm before storm as Uefa and Fifa battle rolls on | Nick AmesRead more

The whole thing seems less important now.

Madrid want him to play full-back but also to act as a rewilding element, a recreation of the Kroos-era passing range, which already sounds like a recipe for a dreamy kind of chaos.

View image in fullscreen

So it’s good for the neutral too, good for the basic sounds and colours, the mouthwatering story arc of Trent inside that deeply vicious media?superstar complex.

This is a footballer who will always be an object of confusion, whose passing is brilliant, sui generis and thrillingly odd in its angles, but who continues to wander about the pitch like a man trying very hard not to spill his Pot Noodle.

Mainly, though, this is all very good for the Club World Cup, which is of course the real story here.

This is the real key to the Club World Cup, and it speaks again to Trent, to extreme, irrational loyalty, to geographical ties, to all those elements that lasso this thing into its existing shape.

The Club World Cup is the first competition where it makes little difference if you boycott it or simply don’t watch.

And who knows, in time Trent to Real Madrid in the mini-window might come to look like a first step, an Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment, the day the world shifted just a little on its axis.

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