Manchester City, going through a rebuilding phase, and Real Madrid and Inter Milan, stuggling to onboard new managers on the very eve of the tournament, are looking much weaker prospects than they normally would be.
The other European clubs are all strong favourites to reach the quarter-finals, with Dortmund and Chelsea probably having the best outside chance of going further. Flamengo, Palmeiras, and River Plate currently look the best of the South American sides, and should qualify from the group phase, but are unlikely to do much more. And I'll be intrigued to see if Al Ahly and Mamelodi Sundowns - dominant in their Egyptian and South African leagues - might be capable of causing a small upset somewhere. The US teams, I fear - even Messi's Inter Miami - are just making up the numbers.
The big pain with this tournament, with such vastly mismatched fixtures in the opening phase, is uncertainty about who's going to play. FIFA was supposedly 'taking measures' to try to ensure that participating clubs would field full-strength sides, but I haven't seen any detail on that, and I suspect it's more in the way of facilitation and encouragement (things like allowing an early, pre-tournament transfer window, and providing for short contract extensions to enable players to stay on at a club for the final stages of the tournament in the first half of July) rather than compulsion. If clubs want to rest top players, it will be easy enough to claim they have a 'knock' keeping them out. And even if a sceptical FIFA were to threaten big fines for such a show of bad faith,... the big clubs would probably be happy enough to pay them, rather than risking their prize assets in a nonsense game. This tournament is likely to be so uncompetitive that the European big dogs could probably sail through the group phase with second-string players or youngsters promoted from their academies. There must be a danger that a few big names might not feature at all; certainly, there's likely to be heavy rotation, with most players getting less than full minutes. So..... we'll need a good bench.
Chelsea look to have the softest group - so, it will be interesting to see if Cole Palmer can rediscover his best form,... and if new signing Liam Delap might have an immediate impact for them up front.
Group A might be one of the tightest groups, with Egyptian champions Al Ahly possibly capable of causing Porto and Palmeiras a few problems. And the bookies actually rate Inter Miami as the group's third strongest prospect, although that's probably just down to the fact that fans in the host nation and Messi idolaters around the world are the only people betting any money on this tournament so far. I suspect that, as with the last World Cup, FIFA will be bending over backwards to try to make sure that Messi goes as far as possible in the tournament, and we can expect his team to be almost immune to picking up cards in the group stage and almost certainly receiving one or two very soft penalties. But will that be enough to get them through? I doubt it.
Group H could also be a tough one, with the star-studded Saudi outfit Al-Hilal (they have Neves, Cancelo, Koulibaly, and Milenkovic-Savic in their lineup) perhaps capable of edging out RB Salzburg for the second spot behind Real Madrid.
Let the games commence!
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