BRIAN READE: 'World Cup is a warning to all fans - I hope it’s a disaster’

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So after a long nine months, the football season finally ends tonight and we can all have a much-needed break from it. Those, like me, who love it, will get the chance to de-stress for a while and those like my wife, who hate it, will be freed from, as she puts it “overpaid morons on the telly screeching ­non-stop drivel”.

Oh no, scrap that. There’s a World Cup happening. Not an old-style one, where there was 16, 24 or even 32 teams and you got a break either side of it. No. In 12 days’ time, for the best part of six weeks, 48 teams will play 104 matches and when it ends on July 19, we’ll be a week away from pre-season friendlies. So no summer break. Just more overkill. All to enable a shameless FIFA , at the peak of its greed and ­cynicism, to rake in an estimated £8billion in media rights, sponsorships and tickets under the laughable guise of giving more countries “the chance to dream”. If only they could give their supporters a chance of getting there.

Vast swathes of host stadiums have been gobbled up by corporate packages, the ticket and hotel prices are scandalously prohibitive and there are long distances to travel on expensive planes between games. They’re even planning an extended half-time Superbowl-style show for the final to lure in advertisers. Thousands of fans are wisely ­snubbing it with hotels reporting floors of empty rooms, and who can blame them? Who would want to go to America now and face the threat of Trump-inspired terror attacks or deportation by ICE agents if they don’t like the colour of your skin or your social media posts?

This World Cup is not a glorious celebration of the planet’s greatest game that it once was, but the sportwashing of the two monstrous mafias – FIFA and MAGA . FIFA boss Gianni Infantino should have resigned in humiliation after the man he invented a peace prize for, Trump, bombed Iranian civilians and continued to green light Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. But where else can you draw a £4.5million salary and be flown first-class around the world being sucked up to by human rights abusers seeking football’s approval?

This World Cup is the ultimate proof of a working-class sport being stolen by the rich and cynically taken away from its lifeblood who make it flourish from grass roots up. It’s a warning to all fans, especially those of Premier League clubs, more than half of which are owned by American money-men who smell the wealth, where the game is headed if we let it. So why give it credibility?

I’m sure many of you will say that nobody is forcing me, and other critics, to watch it. But as a football fan, a pub-goer, a news consumer and a telly watcher, that’s like telling a frog it doesn’t have to hop. We can’t help it. It would be great to see England and Scotland do their nations proud but overall I hope this utterly corrupt, horrendously bloated, money-making vanity project is a disaster.