Yes, I was right/wrong* all along about great/vapid Club World Cup

Giles Smith

Yes, I was right/wrong* all along about great/vapid Club World Cup

*Please delete as appropriate depending whether my team Chelsea win the final


It was always blindingly clear to me that this new expanded Club World Cup was just a vapid Fifa money-spinner, a contrived ­irrelevance sledge-hammered into an already over-stuffed football calendar which would burst before it accommodated it.

But then my team got through to the final, and now it’s manifestly apparent that we are witnessing the birth of a new pinnacle for the club game and the arrival of a quadrennial institution which is already sending roots deep into the football culture.


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It just seemed so needless. What was this thing even doing, disturbing a fallow summer, floating like some kind of LED-bedecked blimp into Wimbledon’s precious air space and sucking the last bits of oxygen from the already gasping lungs of Test cricket. But then my team got through to the final, and it’s obvious that there is ample space in even the most crowded summer of sport for a Club World Cup, especially if you don’t bother with the golf, as why would you?

And where was Fifa’s much vaunted responsibility to player wellbeing? Where was the long-term thinking? Other clubs are reporting back for pre-season training this week, and my team’s players still haven’t stopped – not since last July, actually. Why were they being made to run around in baking hot American stadiums when everyone else was resting? They’d all be next to useless by November.

But then my team got through to the final, and it’s clear this Club World Cup is, among so many other things, a superb way to build momentum and belief going into 2025-26. And they’re young, professional ­athletes, for heaven’s sake. We ­coddle them too much.

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Plus the location hardly helped, condemning the tournament to come slathered in American cheese and be played out in the atmosphere of ­jocular indifference which a nation reared on baseball inevitably brings to its sport-watching. And what was with calling it the “Superior Player of the Match” award? How irritating was that? Actually it was worse, because it turned out the full title was the “Fifa Michelob Ultra Superior Player of the Match” award. Which said it all about a sport driven to eat itself by its own commercial greed.

But then my team got through to the final, and do you see what they’re doing there? Because “superior” is a word that you can attach to someone who has risen above others in some way. But it’s also the name of a beer! That’s brilliant word-play. Superior word-play, you could even say!

Also, we absolutely love a ­countdown to kick-off, don’t we? All together now: ‘10! 9! 8!...’

And as for the tournament’s appointed broadcaster, Dazn, well, how would you even begin to measure the full spirit-sapping effect of its shopping-channel inanity, its hospital radio commentary teams, and its insistence that we watch the game through a clattering string-curtain of invitations to upgrade and adverts for tawdry boxing undercards. And that name! It’s pronounced”Da Zone”. What? Give me a break.

But then my team got through to the final, and you would have to say that, in the wild west of deregulated broadcasting, few outlets are clinging as determinedly as Dazn to the classic Reithian ideals of information, ­education and entertainment. And have you noticed the striking similarity between John Obi Mikel and the late Richard Dimbleby?

And then there was the news that President Trump will attend the final, and anything which rebounded to the glory of that blundering pufferfish was not to be tolerated by anybody who cared about fundamental human decency or democracy.

But then my team got through to the final, and say what you like about Trump, he has got a lot of the Nato nations taking their obligations more seriously, and again, for good or bad, he’s certainly given a voice to groups who have long felt marginalised in the rush towards economic ­globalism, such as racists.

I got it wrong, is what I’m saying. And when we get things wrong, I think we should be strong enough to say so. Of course, if my team now lose, as seems quite likely, then I was right about the Club World Cup all along.


Photograph by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images


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