Now it's getting INTERESTING....

 

As 'MatchDay 1' has just drawn to a close, I am putting together some further thoughts on FIFA's new club tournament, as it unfolds before us.

And I have to say, I am favourably impressed. 

There was a lot to carp at about this new venture: it's probably too big a tournament, at least for the first iteration; the selection of participating teams was subject to some unfortunate chicanery (inevitable with FIFA, alas: and anything that has Gianni Infantino's smug, unctuous visage associated with it is automatically tainted...); and it's been very poorly promoted over the past year (I work pretty hard to stay on top of football news, but I don't think I even knew it was happening until about six months ago, and had to do a lot of digging to discover basic details like when and where it was to be held and who the participating clubs would be); and of course, one worries about the toll on the players (exhaustion and increased susceptibility to injury likely to be a problem for some at the start of the new domestic season in a couple of months). But... I think the idea is admirable: a larger, more inclusive tournament than we've seen before, to provide a stage for leading clubs from all regions to test themselves against each other. (Some of the clubs from nations that are less developed - economically and in their footballing infrastructure - are inevitably not going to be able to make much impression in the competition at this stage. But they will one day. And experiences like this will help them get there.)

However, it had been commonly supposed - and I had fallen prey to that pessimism myself - that the group stage of the tournament would be largely redundant, as few if any of the teams from other continents would be able to compete with the might of the big Europeans sides. And that hasn't entirely been the case. With the inevitable exception of plucky little Auckland - part-timers providing token representation from Oceania - and El Ain.... and, yes, the US clubs.... everyone else has put up a respectable challenge. 

Perhaps the Europeans just haven't hit their stride yet. I feel that Bayern and PSG cruised to easy wins against weak opponents without really playing all that well; as did Manchester City and Chelsea, winning less emphatically, but still quite comfortably. But Salzburg, Porto, Inter, Dortmund, Benfica, and even Atletico all performed rather poorly in their opening games. While even some of the less fancied South American teams like Botafogo, Fluminense, and Monterrey have all looked quite handy. (And I'm starting to get moderately excited about the prospects for my dark horse favourites, South Africa's Mamelodi Sundowns.)

It certainly looks like we could have some more exciting and unpredictable clashes in prospect over the next two group rounds than we had anticipated. And there does seem to be a chance - still slim, perhaps, but far from negligible - that a few 'surprise' teams will make it through to the knockout phase.

For me, the one team who've looked really good so far were Juventus. I would be amazed if young Francisco Conceição (above) has not shot up to being one of the most-owned Fantasy players in this tournament by the start of MatchDay 2.

The media coverage provided by DAZN has been pretty impressive too. I found the sign-up process surprisingly swift and painless: regiestering a phone number was glitchy, and of course you had to click through a few distracting attempts to upsell you to one of the paid subscription versions of their service - but it really wasn't too bad at all. (I got up half an hour before the opening game, anticipating - on the basis of similar hellish experiences in the past - that it would probably take me at least that long to navigate the minefield of  'freemium registration'; but it took barely two minutes. So.... I was able to watch almost the whole of the pre-game show! Talk about a mixed blessing....)

Their streams seem very fast and stable, and have very good resolution. This is way the best online coverage I've ever watched - just the gradual advance of technology, I guess. (And NO - I'm not being paid to say this.)  The commentators are required to plug upcoming paid events on the channel occasionally; and you do get banner ads popping up around the edges of the screen once in a while - but you have to expect a little of this sort of thing with a free service, and I'm really not finding it unduly intrusive.

The problems, however, arise with non-lve viewing.... The highlights reels promoted in my sidebar on Youtube are almost invariably in Spanish. (I presume this is a sign that the tournament has a big following in Latin America, and so Spanish versions of the highlights are posted first... and/or made more 'prominent' to the platform in other ways)  Finding an English option takes a bit of digging around. The Youtube 'search engine', never great, seems to have become extremely artificially stupid in the last year or so: despite suggesting via auto-complete 'in English commentary' as a useful tag for improving search results, the search engine appears to be ignorant of what this means, and still usually directs you to highlights in every language other than English. You can root out some English clips eventually, but it's a little bit of a rigmarole. And they always seem to be very short - whereas some of the Spanish compilations last for 12 or 14 minutes (I'm scraping the rust off the little bit of Spanish I learnt in my schooldays....).

I do find it slightly vexing that the DAZN site itself implies that full 'as live' re-runs are available to non-subscribed viewers, but.... when you click on these options, you find that they're only brief highlights. They appear to be labelled as 'Full Replay' on the control bar at the bottom of the screen, but this turns out to be a cruel deception: when you hover your mouse-cursor over this description, you discover that it is in fact a rolling menu - with 'Full Replay' and 'Extended Hihglights' revealed as 'locked' to non-subscribers when you click on them. I suppose this is the kind of low trickery they need to resort to try to squeeze a few new subscriptions for themselves out of the interest in this tournament, but.... it is mightily vexing.

The 'workaround' I've discovered is that while a match/programme is still in progress, you can select the option to view it from the beginning. This certainly seems to continue to be available while the post-match discussion is going on (half an hour or so after the game has ended); and it might possibly continue to be so even after the show has ended..... though probably not for very long? Anyhow, in my timezone, this means that I can get up at around 7am to watch the match that started at 5am (on UTC+6) by 'rewinding' to the start (and you can use the slider bar on the bottom of the screen to fast-forward through the ads and studio bits); and then do the same again for the 7am game a couple of hours later, joining at the very end, and scrolling back to the start. (Again, this is much better - and more conveniently timed - coverage than I am able to enjoy with Premier League games!)

And the Fantasy game itself...?  Well, that's a right pain-in-the-arse, isn't it?  But that, I think, will have to get a post all of its own.... soon.