‘Mo Salah is not one of the best participant on the planet – he is an unexciting penalty service provider’

I’m not having this Mo Salah-Ballon d’Or hype, sorry.

Like Taylor Swift, the only remarkable thing about Salah is his position in the charts. Everything else he does is like Danny Murphy’s punditry – functional, but painfully unexciting.

He’s like Wilson the volleyball in Cast Away – just sort of there, occasionally bobbing up to steal focus, usually to tuck away a penalty someone else has won for him. Otherwise he’s about as involved in the action as ‘Sleepy’ Joe Biden was during the final months of his presidency.

He ‘bosses’ games the way a vegan might boss a butcher’s shop, i.e., not at all – and like Matt Hancock, he doesn’t really do much except make headlines for scoring. I’m not saying he’s rubbish, or even that he shouldn’t win the Ballon d’Or. It’s just that his numbers massively overegg how well he’s been doing – just like Keir Starmer and that landslide majority of his.

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the best player in the world was supposed to do more than just pad his stats with tap-ins and spot kicks (Salah’s averaging one penalty every three games this season, by the way). If that’s the benchmark for greatness, then someone get Chris Wood fitted for a tux.

Thief-A World Cup

FIFA are planning to stage a World Cup final half time show, and honestly it’s the biggest pile of American nonsense since Meghan Markle dragged Prince Harry on their World Wide Privacy Tour.

We all know that organisation is about as shameless and out of touch with reality as Cristiano Ronaldo is when comparing himself to Lionel Messi, but this? This has got to be one of the most pointless and counterproductive additions since Tottenham signed Timo Werner.

You know exactly what it’ll be like: some tacky, Poundland version of the Super Bowl halftime show crammed with more B-listers than Celebrity Love Island. Expect to see Salt Bae, iShowSpeed, and Gianni Infantino desperately Jason Tindalling himself in front of every camera he can find.

This Americanisation of football has to be stopped. Otherwise we’ll be putting up with mid-match adverts plugging Bud Light and Snickers, and tuning in to the Champions League final at the Pepsi Presents: San Siro . It’s all going to hell in a corporate-sponsored handbasket.

There’s also talk of FIFA expanding the 2030 World Cup to 64 teams, which sounds about as sensible as Arsenal not buying a striker in January. I mean for crying out loud, the qualifiers are already stretched out further than Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s employee lunch budget, and this’ll make them completely needless, like 90% of all Chelsea signings.

What’s the point of the World Cup if half the planet’s invited? Imagine it: watching Papua New Guinea vs Sudan in Group Q, played in front of 350 confused locals, knowing there are still 117 matches to go before the knockouts. It’s pure participation trophy b***ocks.