Saaaaaaaammmmmm The Club World Cup is already proving as irrelevant as any year, I actually quite like the idea of an intercontinental club competition, but FIFA have made it a complete meaningless shambles
So usually my interest lies with following Auckland City, the annual minnows, who will always be a fixture in the competition due to the fact they've won the Oceania Champions League six years in a row now (the closest they came to losing was probably 2014 when they scraped a late winner over the mighty Amicale from Vanuatu)
2014 was the year Auckland heroically reached the semi-finals of the CWC and took the South American champions to extra time, but it'll always be difficult as the format requires the OFC winner to play a play-off round against the host nation's club, then a quarter-final, then the semi-final which is the stage the UEFA and South American sides join
This is the problem, as this year Auckland were knocked out to an 88th minute winner by Kashima Antlers. The Antlers then went on to beat Mamelodi Sundowns of Africa, before seeing off Atlético Nacional of South America yesterday to become the first Asian team to reach the final of the competition (this has been making the news mainly as Kashima were awarded a penalty by the video referee, a process which took over six minutes)
However the Antlers are not even a continental champion, they sneaked in by winning the J-League just two weeks ago. Rather than make the competition for all the continental winners (a fairly round six teams), FIFA try and shoehorn the tournament hosts in. The problem being, the hosts are Japan pretty much every single year, so pretty much every single year there's a Japanese side taking part without even winning their Champions League. This means the format has to adapt to an awkward seven teams, and now one of the finalists of the Club World Cup is a team that aren't even the best on their continent
Also, with a total of six matches played in the knockout format, we end up playing four of those before the inevitable champions, Real Madrid, even join the competition. Real open their campaign today against Club America of, America, and if they win that then it's them against the Antlers for the title of world's best
If you're not going to do this competition properly FIFA, I'm not sure why you're even bothering
While we look down our noses at the CWC, it is a big deal in South America.
Infantino has proposed expanding the competition to 32 teams, having a format like the Champions League and playing it in June
