Relics, Don't Do It...

In the ground floor atrium of Zurich’s troubled FIFA World Football Museum a display case featuring shirts from FIFA’s 211 member associations was failing to impress three visiting American teenagers. “Who are Timor Leicester?” one asked. “They should host the World Cup in the US, like, every year,” added his friend.

 

- James Corbett

The students formed exactly half of the museum’s other visitors during my two-hour visit, a tally that gives a hint of the problems to plague the attraction since it opened in February last year. Original annual visitor projections of 250,000 have long been downgraded to 130,000, but even these numbers seem optimistic.

Nor seemingly is the museum of much interest to the new FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, who has tried to steer his presidency away from the pomposity Sepp Blatter once applied to an office he seemed to model upon a head of state’s. In many ways the museum has become a battleground between old and new concepts of the organisation; a grandiose and loss-making relic at a time when the new regime is embarking on severe cost-cutting.

Despite a start-up opening budget of 140 million Swiss francs (£112m) and expensive ticket prices the museum has been claimed to be losing an eye-watering £500,000 each week. At a time when FIFA is undertaking cost saving measures to overcome holes in its budget due to fleeing sponsors, legal costs of its corruption scandals and vast electoral promises for increased payments to member associations, such losses are anathema.