Manchester United are all in on a planned expansion of Fifa’s lucrative Club World Cup

“The Manchurians are coming!” cried an alarmed and rather confused Liverpool supporter standing outside Anfield. This warning was issued in the 1980s when trouble between United and Liverpool fans was at a peak and tension high. Liverpool fans laughed at one of their brood confusing Mancunians with people from north east China rather than 30 miles away, but Anfield was not for the faint hearted back then. After one infamous incident where the team were tear-gassed as they disembarked their coach at Anfield, Manchester United manager Rob Atkinson described it as being “worse than Vietnam”. Big Ron’s role in fighting the Vietcong was never clarified.

Now it transpires that Mancunians, Liverpudlians – and Manchurians – could finally meet in the same place in June 2021.

Manchester United’s executive vice chair Ed Woodward made an interesting reference to developments in the football industry during his club’s quarterly conference call to investors on Monday. Second, in the list of published “highlights”, was the following sentence: “Fifa Club World Cup expands to 24 teams from seven beginning in 2021, with the first tournament to be played in China.”

Why should this be such a prominent concern that it has been announced to Manchester United investors?

The criteria for entry hasn’t even been decided and United are far from the best in the world right now, but Fifa wants to get away from the current lopsided tournament, where the European champions have won 11 of the past 12 competitions since Brazilian teams won the first three when it started in Rio de Janeiro in 2000. United were one of the competing teams in Brazil and fared poorly, but they got into that competition because they won the Champions League as part of the 1999 treble.