Does This All Make Sense?

Bob Koep
OBE Blog

The votes are still out whether the club world championships make any sense. With Manchester United today winning the seven team tournament in Japan, 1-0 over Liga of Quito, Ecuador, the end result is quite as expected. But after several years of running this format the show still hasn’t attracted world wide attention even though some TV stations, like Fox Sport in this country, have run games live.

Of course, FIFA is forever searching for new sources of revenue and a few years ago started to modify the one-shot world club final into an eight game tournament.

For most of over 20 years the European Cup winners and the South American Copa Libertadore holders met in a single game clash that was called the Toyota Cup in Tokyo for the bragging rights of being the world’s number one team.

But in the year 2000 FIFA smelled some source if income by enlarging the show to a multi-team tournament with the champions of all six federations plus a host team. But FIFA probably didn’t expect that the fans wouldn’t take the bait easily.

Hardly any news organization covered the event and most media only mentioned the results in a one-liner.

And you cannot blame them. This year’s tournament started with a preliminary elimination game between Adelaide United of Australia and Waitakere of New Zealand. Hardly household names.

After that was over, Adelaide went on to play Gamba Osaka the representative of the host country, Japan.

While the first game drew hardly any fans, the presence of a local favorite boosted the attendance in the Toyota Stadium at Toyota City to 38,000.

Then on it went with Pachuca of Mexico, the CONCACAF champions, beating Al Ahli of Egypt (African champion) in a half empty stadium.

Even the semi-final between Pachuca and Quito (0-2) drawing just 33,000 and then the first full house, when Osaka dropped a 5-3 score to Manchester United in the cavernous 66,000 seat International Stadium at Yokohama.

But then the fun started. Hoping to squeeze out some more revenue, the tournament had a game for fifth place and then one for third place. Now never in the history of soccer has a tournament had a playoff for fifth place and we wonder whether anybody remembers the winner (Adelaide).

But outside of the South American and European teams, hardly anybody has ever heard of the other five contestants and it seems odd that Gamba Osaka now can call itself the third best team in the world