Best / World / Paris
One of Paris SG and Chelsea will be able to call themselves the best football team in the world after the French side beat Real Madrid 4-0 in the Semi Final of the Club World Cup to set up a final on Sunday.
The Club World Cup draws to an end which highlights something quintessential about modern football with the mix of the grotesque and the splendour of a game that remains naturally beautiful regardless of the gaudy bangles draped over it.
Football is football is football, and on the whole when the teams are well-matched in both ability and desire to win the games can be entertaining. The Club World Cup has shown significant divides – the 10-0 win for Bayern Munich over Auckland City was ugly – but slight ones too, with the American challenge barely registering and the South American one disappointing.
Auckland City will always have the time they knocked Boca Juniors out of a competition to remind them, and the millions of dollars they and every other team escape with. It is wife-changing money for football in many countries.
Perversion
The perversion of football leagues aside the idea that one of Chelsea – Premier League bronze medallists – and Paris SG who struggled to get past Aston Villa in the Champions League last eight are the best team in the world is at best misguided, and football would do well to stop its attempts to anoint someone as such.
There is an obsession in the game seen in the Club World Cup, and in the idea of a Cross European Super League, and in the aforementioned Champions League to have a definitive winner. All these attempts seem to fail prima facie given how we know that knockout football can give results which few would call definitive rankings but the attempts to find them seem to both fail and cheapen the search.
As previously mentioned, Malmö FF won the Allsvenskan last season, and start playing in the Champions League this year, but should they not repeat the heroics of 1979, the Allsvenskan is revealed somewhat as a lesser thing. Naturally so – we know instinctively that leagues are of different quality – but needlessly. Should Tottenham, 17th in the Premier League last year, end up bashing the Swedes, then it embarrasses them more than seems necessary.
Most obviously Malmö FF, Hamrun Spartans of Malta, Iceland’s Breiðablik, Noah of Armenia are not trying to build teams to beat Newcastle United on a cold night on the Toon, or Nice on a nice night for that matter. They are trying to win games in their own league
Portable
This is the perversion of the attempt to find the best club across unlike competitions. It finds the most portable club. The one who has a way of playing which is universal in some way, and decisively so. Having a team that can win a league near the Arctic Circle counts for little, and the same is often true of the Italian game, which transfers poorly aboard in some of its manifestations.
So to greater and lesser degrees Leagues, and countries, are measured by the strength of their performance in these attempts, regardless of the qualities of that league. Argentina has a bad league, because Brazil got further in the Club World Cup, and Paris SG’s success is the riposte to all who would call Ligue 1 a “Farmer’s League”, as if those people were worth engaging with in the first place.
This is football indulging in the process of enshittification. We should call it out as such, and we should find a way to watch one game a week from some far-flung league that Football.tv throws up, or the men huffing and wheezing in front of two blokes and a dog, just because the best football is often the football in front of your eyes.