One last word on the Club World Cup

 

One slight variation on the common complaints against the Club World Cup (petty jibes which I further castigated at the start of this week) seemed to become even more prevalent in the days following the Final. It's really just a riff on the selfish resentment that 'my team wasn't in it'; this time that gripe is expanded - so as to try to dodge charges of parochial self-interest - into a more general claim that the competition was 'worthless' because so many of the world's top teams were not taking part in it. One commenter I saw particularly amused me with the absurd assertion that fully 'half' of the world's best teams were missing from the tournament!

OK, we have to grant that the absences of Barcelona and Liverpool were regrettable. (If FIFA was willing to bend over backwards to contrive the participation of Leo Messi, could they not have performed similar contortions to include Mo Salah and Lamine Yamal??)  And one might perhaps add Ajax to that list - consistently the best Dutch team, although their great side of a few years ago is, sadly, almost entirely broken up. But aside from that, can you name even one or two teams, let alone half a dozen or more remotely as good as PSG or Bayern Munich or Real Madrid or Manchester City or Inter Milan - or, yes indeed, the suddenly renascent Chelsea? [Manchester United fans, let it go. You're just making yourselves look ridiculous and pathetic. You haven't even been a force in English football for a dozen years now.] And let us not forget the high standard of competitors we saw from the rest of the world: Inzaghi's Al-Hilal and the Brazilian teams, in particular, produced some outstanding football, and were worthy opponents for Europe's best.

And then you get down to the 'second tier' of European entrants - mostly rather disappointing in the tournament, but still 'big' names, and with a significant enough record in European competitions to justify their inclusion: Juventus, Dortmund, Atletico Madrid, Benfica, Salzburg. It's pretty difficult to name any omitted clubs better than those. Doing well in your domestic league last season clearly isn't enough: this selection is based on a four-year timeframe, and you need to have established some consistency in continental competitions over that period. Atalanta are probably the strongest contender among the omitted Italian sides on that basis (AC Milan have fallen on hard times in recent years, and haven't made much impact in Europe for a long time; Napoli's renascence is too recent...). Leverkusen and Leipzig from the Bundesliga might feel a little hard done-by, but, despite recent successes, they're not really yet unseating Germany's 'big two'. Arsenal clearly look to have the quality to stand alongside the best participants in this competition - but they've still achieved nothing in Europe, so they haven't earned the place yet.  Anyone else???  NO.

It is, in any event, fatuous to question a tournament's worth because some of the teams you'd like to see in it - some of the 'best' teams - are absent, or don't progress very far. That's always going to happen in any tournament. Some teams hit a run of bad form and/or terrible luck and don't even get through a qualifying competition. Others run into those problems early in the tournament itself - perhaps undone by a solitary bizarre mistake, or a terrible refereeing decision to their detriment, or an uncharacteristic, one-off playing-their-socks-off performance by a 'lesser' opponent. Some suffer - or benefit - from a ridiculously lop-sided draw (if we're honest with ourselves, that was probably the single biggest factor in Gareth Southgate's extraordinary run of 'success' with the England team). The World Cup - and the various continental tournaments for national teams - is rarely won by the best team in it; sometimes, the best team won't even reach the semi-finals. Hopefully the eventual champ will be a worthy winner, clearly one of the best three or four or five contenders - but they're seldom the actual No.1. That's just the way it goes.

This new Club World Cup is an unusual and unfamiliar format for club competition: it's the only one I can think of that's only going to be held once-every-four-years rather than annually. So, the selection criteria have to look at the whole period since the last iteration of the tournament, not just last season. [There is, I think, a case for significantly increasing the weighting for the current season, and, to a lesser extent, for the season before, as it clearly seems unfair that an isolated good performance two or three years ago should carry anywhere near as much weight as one this year or last.]

It's focused on continents rather than countries, on the elite continental competitions rather than the national leagues. Sorry, Arsenal (Newcastle, Spurs, et al) - you've got to win the Champions League (or at least get to the semis a couple of times...) before you get a sniff at this. Might never happen? Tough luck!

Above all, this new competition is looking to be inclusive and representative - seeking to bring together a similar number of competitors from every region, and from as many different countries as possible within the regions. 

Now, clearly, with the current state of the world game, the 10 (or 20....?) best teams might all be from Europe. But that's not the point, is it? We don't want a new competition only for European teams (we already have that!). We're creating a tournament that pits a strong representative sample of Europe's finest teams against similar groups of clubs from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. If we admit that it is reasonable - essential - to limit Europe to 12 entries in total, you can't really make much of an argument that at least the vast majority of the 12 European teams taking part this time didn't deserve to be there. The fact that some excellent teams are going to miss out each time is inevitable - and nothing to cry over.

 

Sure, in this first iteration of the new tournament, the selection criteria might have been somewhat flawed; and there was a lack of transparency in FIFA's process. (Chelsea were particularly fortunate to be included, since they haven't actually done anything domestically or in Europe within the last four years. They were presumably getting credit for their out-of-nowhere Champions League win under Thomas Tuchel - but that was five seasons ago!! Too long ago to be accorded that much weight; and not properly within the eligible timeframe anyway - WTF??)  

And of course, the modest subterfuge involved into crowbarring Messi's Inter Miami into the tournament also undermined FIFA's 'credibility' (not that they have an awful lot of that left anyway; though at least they're still some distance behind the International Olympic Committee in the 'risibly corrupt' stakes!). Having Messi participate in the tournament was a reasonable enough objective, and FIFA would have looked less ridiculous and dishonest if they'd just allowed themselves ONE 'Wildcard Entry' that was entirely discretionary - rather than attempting to 'justify' their decision with a post facto invention of criteria.

These problems certainly need to be ironed out for the next tournament in 2029. But, apart from these two unfortunate blips in the selection process (where the only objection would be as to the rationality and transparency of the methodology, rather than the results - which weren't wildly unjust, and did serve to enhance the tournament), there weren't really any egregiously unfair inclusions or omissions. And within the framework of this tournament's intentions - to provide a truly global competition, not a parochially Europe-dominated one - the selection process worked out pretty well. Enough with all the 'My team wasn't in it' whining!