Twenty-five years ago, Argentine referee Juan Carlos Loustau prepared to take charge of the then-annual match in Japan between the champions of Europe and South America, Barcelona and Sao Paulo.
He has just revealed that the night before the match he found the rival coaches deep in discussion. Lovers of good, well-played football, Johan Cruyff of Barcelona and Tele Santana of Sao Paulo, coach of Brazil in the World Cups of 1982 and 86, saw Loustau and called him over.
“They spoke of football as if it was something sacred,” reveals Loustau. “They said that to interrupt the game with fake injuries, time-wasting and making substitutions just to run the clock down was not valid. They were convinced that to lose playing well was not a failure and in a game played in the right spirit, there was no such thing as winners and losers.”
And the next day their ideals were borne out by their teams, who played out a splendid match in which Barcelona took the lead, but Sao Paulo hit back to win 2-1.
It is unfortunate that back then more attention was not paid to this annual meeting. It was fascinating and, at times such as the one described, an inspiring meeting between the champions of two well-balanced footballing continents.
Now, however, it seems that no amount of good spirit can rescue the Club World Cup, which since its inauguration in 2005 has been dogged by the imbalance that now exists between top-level club football in Europe and the other continents.
True, there have been three South American victories – all Brazilian triumphs. But Sao Paulo in 2005 (beating Liverpool), Internacional in 2006 (beating Barcelona) and Corinthians in 2012 (beating Chelsea) all took the field aware of a technical inferiority which simply did not exist a few years earlier.
The opening up of the global market in footballers, with the best South Americans (as well as Africans, Asians, etc.) playing for the European side, left the champions of the Copa Libertadores with one way out: cover up, hang on, and hope to break out and win the game by a single goal. The final has never seen two teams taking the field hoping to outplay each other. The tournament is hugely popular in South America – where the idea of having a crack at the winners of the Champions League has huge attraction – but has little appeal to the neutral.
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In Saturday’s 2017 final, for example, Gremio of Brazil were roared on by 7000 fans who had made the journey to Abu Dhabi. But they had very little to cheer. In 90 minutes their team could only muster one shot at goal – off target. The game became a question of whether – and then how many – Real could score. They won 1-0, but it could easily have been five or six.
There is talk of a change of format, with a longer version of the competition filling the slot which in recent times has been taken by the Confederations Cup. But this is no instant solution. For one thing it adds yet more matches to an already packed calendar, placing further demands on the already overburdened limbs of top players. For another, the likelihood is that the Europeans would still dominate, and that having two or more teams from the continent in the competition would be a pale attempt to recreate the Champions League.
There are signs of progress in some quarters – the money coursing through Chinese football, for example, and the consolidation of MLS in the United States. There is, then, the possibility of a less Euro-centric future.
But as things stand there seems to be little hope for South America. Brazil was supposed to be leading the way. Just a few years ago it was common to read – in fine books such as Soccernomics, for example – that the Brazilian domestic game was well on the way to putting itself on the same level as top-class European football.
Emphatically this has not happened. Brazil’s economy was once booming where Europe was full of problems. And Brazil has staged a World Cup, with all the investments this entails. But the gap keeps getting wider – to the point where it is hardly a surprise that the South American champions cannot even force a single save from the Costa Rican in the Real Madrid goal.
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