Ordinarily folks, we would not get excited about and drawn in by the Club World Cup. And, of course, this Club World Cup has been no exception.
As a football tournament it’s been precisely what we all feared. Half-arsed and entirely exhausted players have given games the feel of high-class pre-season friendlies rather than the assumed low-bar aim at this point of low-class major tournament football.
Like previous, titchier Club World Cup events it has carried the vibe of being more important to the South Americans than the Europeans, which again makes sense. European teams already know the Champions League crowns the best club side in the world. And just as importantly, South American teams also know this.
In a first stage riddled with predictable mismatches and some pretty piss-poor football, we nevertheless emerged with a last 16 duly dominated by sides from the two traditional heartlands. The three interlopers were one traditional big beast from Mexico, which is football heartland anyway, plus a team that has Lionel Messi and a team bankrolled by Saudi.
Inter Miami have already been sorted out 4-0 by PSG and Man City should do likewise to Al-Hilal. The quarter-final line-up has every chance of looking very much like a common-or-garden Champions League line-up with a tiny bit of Palmeiras chucked in.
So, yeah. It’s not been great in most of the ways you could easily predict it wouldn’t have been great.
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What we didn’t necessarily expect in our gloomy change-fearing forecasts for the tournament was that it would make us even more concerned than we already were about next summer’s World Cup.
In many ways, America is enormously lucky nobody is paying this tournament much attention. Otherwise they may have noticed the weather conditions are essentially unplayable because it’s either far too hot or lightning strikes mean we need to wait 30 minutes every time it happens. And it can happen twice.
The pitches too have frequently not been up to scratch for venues that are obviously not primarily soccer stadia but will need to do more compelling impressions of them a year from now, when avoiding attention by going under the radar will no longer be an option.
And that’s before we even get to the thornier and even more uncomfortable facts of the current political situation in America and swirling around the world largely because of America. It’s very hard to shake the notion that were a tournament facing all these issues set to take place anywhere on earth other than Western Europe and possibly Australia there would now be widespread calls for it to be moved somewhere more suitable.
It would also be very hard now to say those calls would be misplaced. Even the fact it’s being co-hosted by Canada and Mexico adds its own problems.
On the face of it, it should help. To the south you are adding the World Cup knowhow and legitimacy of football’s greatest and longest established stronghold outside the European and South American heartlands and with it actual football rather than merely sporting infrastucture, to the north a large wealthy and respected country that isn’t completely f***ing mental.
But what you gain there you lose with the vast increase on the already vast area across which this vast World Cup will take place and the concerns this raises on practical, environmental and, yes once again, more mundane player welfare levels.
We knew the new World Cup format was going to be a big problem, but we hadn’t truly considered just how much worse it could actually be because of the conditions under which it would be played. And we should have seen that coming, really, because we all remember the Irish lads pretty much melting at USA 94.
That was over 30 years ago and very little seems to have changed beyond an acceptance that maybe we should let players drink some water in 95 degree heat actually.
It was very easy to laugh and mock Qatar with its barely concealed plan to move the World Cup to winter and its enormous air-con machines, but at least those ‘solutions’ offered some awareness that a problem exists.
There’s more fun and games coming on that front with every chance the 2029 Club World Cup heads that way rather than, as we’d naively and in hindsight rather adorably assumed, heading to Spain/Portugal/Morocco as another US-style World Cup test event.
Because why host a major football tournament somewhere that makes sense when there’s more short-term money to be made by hosting it somewhere completely unsuitable?
A Qatar Club World Cup and the absolute carnage it would bring to domestic seasons can wait for another day. For now we’re left with a Club World Cup in America that has been even less exciting than we expected.
And means we fear for the 2026 World Cup, we really do.
