(UPDATED, with thoughtful comment below on Concacaf/MLS.)
Inter Milan won the Fifa Club World Cup tonight, and that absolutely falls into “dog bites man” on the news-o-meter scale. Inter’s opponent in the final here in Abu Dhabi was TP Mazembe of the Congo, a team spending $10 million on players this season, or about what Samuel Eto’o makes all by himself. (May want to follow that link; it charts how much Eto’o makes while you’re on the site. He’s made 1,300 euro, about $2,000, since I first got there.)
Final: Inter 3, Mazembe 0.
And why was that such an easy call?
I give credit to Bernard Schumm, a German coach who works for the UAE national team, for making this clear to me.
Back when I did the story last week about “when will someone reach the final who is not from Europe or South America?” … I quoted him as saying, sure, in any given game a team from North America or Asia or, in this case, Africa … could beat just about anyone. A couple of chances, the underdog converts them, and the big club is banging balls off the woodwork. Not the way to bet, a long shot, but it could happen. Like, say, TP Mazembe shocking Internacional of Brazil 2-0 in the semifinals.
What Schumm noted was that that these comparatively teeny clubs simply cannot win two consecutive games against European and South American competition. Which is the task they face as long as Europe and South America are seeded into opposite sides of the semifinal bracket. Lucky once? Once in a great while. Lucky twice? Not happening. Not for a long, long time.
Mazembe was good but Mazembe also was lucky against the Brazilians. Mazembe was less good and not vaguely as lucky against Inter, and that’s why it was a 3-0 romp. Mazembe had its “any given day” in the semis. It didn’t have another day in it.
Does Mazembe’s breakthrough in the semis suggest that Asia, Africa and North America are about to at least start playing in the final regularly?
Well, actually, no.
Let’s go over this continent by continent — and we’ll leave out Oceania because, well, c’mon. Oceania now is a couple of semipro leagues in New Zealand and the South Pacific.
North America? You’ve got the Mexican League, which is pretty good, but not remotely Euro/South America good. Which has been demonstrated six consecutive years now. Central America has a handful of semi-decent sides, like Saprissa of Costa Rica. The big hope for the Concacaf crowd is that somehow a Major League Soccer team emerges, or the sport becomes popular enough in the U.S. that the whole MLS has the money to recruit foreigners in their prime and MLS sides start winning the continental championship. So far, it hasn’t happened, and it doesn’t look like it will. And, really, we can start talking about the vague possibility of a U.S. team showing up at a Club World Cup as a serious contender only when U.S. teams start winning the Concacaf Champions League, which they haven’t done since the Los Angeles Galaxy way back in 2000.
(If we didn’t know better, we’d think the MLS just doesn’t care about the Champions League … and actually, I’m not sure it does; Mexico’s teams aren’t that much better.)
OK, and here is the one other “hope” — that some Mexican narco-lord decides to plow drug money into his favorite club. Sort of like Pablo Escobar did down in Colombia two decades back. Not sure we should ever hope for that, but as Mexico’s government seems to be collapsing, it could happen.
Asia? A sprawling continent, home to more than half of the human race … and only two above-average professional leagues on the whole continent. Unless you count Saudi Arabia or Australia or Iran … well, we won’t. The two decent leagues are the J-League in Japan and the K-League in South Korea, which are well-run and can play a little. But in the European scheme of things, where would the J and K leagues rank? Maybe about with Denmark’s league? Romania’s? Miles behind, say, France’s Ligue 1 … and not even in the same discussion with the Premier League or Spain’s La Liga. Expecting Korea or Japan to cough up a serious, Euro-caliber club team, well, not going to happen, especially when those countries’ best players are playing for Euro clubs.
Africa? The most interesting one, for this reason: In Africa, we just found out, enough good soccer players are running around that the European leagues haven’t discovered them all yet. Hard to imagine, in this age of mega-scouting, but Mazembe showed up here with a half-dozen guys who could play for some of the better leagues in Europe. But somehow Europe didn’t know about them. It could be a function of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — the former Zaire. Look at your globe, it’s that huge country in the southern half of the continent. One with extraordinary natural resources but, historically, horrible governance extending back to … well, forever. It has the second-lowest per-capita income in the world, and it has lots of places where your basic Euro scout would not go. Thus, Mazembe somehow slipped into the UAE with some real talent, and some decent coaching, and the support of the governor of the province of Katanga (the same man who runs the team), and a “whopping” $10 million budget high enough to buy a fairly high fraction of all the best players in a country that loves soccer but doesn’t seem to have many guys playing professional outside the country. Yet.
Thing is, now, after a runner-up finish, how many of those Mazembe guys will be snapped up, on the cheap, by the Eredivisie or some second-division French team? Some of them? Most of them?
And then Mazembe will be like Africa’s other club teams, stripped of its best players, fighting it out on a cash-poor continent with teams far better on the national level than on the club level.
So, anyway, this may have been a one-shot deal. Even given the “any given day” thing, we may not have one of those given days rolling around anytime soon in the Club World Cup as it goes over to Japan for the next two years. It’s still a fun idea, and a colorful one, but it’s really hard to imagine an outsider playing for the title again soon — never mind winning it.
1 response so far ↓
1 Eos // Dec 22, 2010 at 4:23 AM
The historical problems MLS teams have had in CONCACAF competition have been consequential to:
* lousy timing – knockout rounds have been played when MLS teams are in training camps or during the first few weeks of the season. And since the format adjustment, the group stages have taken place during the home stretch of the regular season.
* inability to defend home field – at best, MLS teams might eke out a close victory at home, leaving no margin for error on the road. (Of course, MLS teams’ putative home advantages typically have been blunted by strong visitors’ support, especially for Mexican clubs.)
* league parity – a good team one year (thus qualifying for international competition) is too often a lousy team the next year (when the competition takes place).
* indifference – to be fair, this would seem to be a CONCACAF-wide problem, although perhaps no current competitors have approached the aggressive uninterest once displayed by the New England Revolution (the first time the team actually deigned to play a game at home was in its third appearance in the tournament, which it promptly went out and lost 0-4 — to Joe Public). It probably hasn’t helped that the confederation has changed the competition format four times in the past decade.
* fate’s fickle fingers – in 2007, after Houston and DC’s solid performances, it was reasonable to assume that an MLS team would soon break through. And when DC (which had put up a respectable record over 2005-07 in CONCACAF and two Copa Sudamericana appearances) brought in a passel of South American reinforcements — most notably Marcelo Gallardo — it seemed pretty clear that they were targeting the 2008 tournament. But DC lost another close semifinal, and hasn’t been the same since. And then the format changed (again), and it’s taken MLS teams longer than other to adjust (as always seems to be the case).
But if there is to be an MLS breakthrough, next year’s knockout stages would seem to be the time. The two MLS quarterfinalists (Salt Lake and Columbus) have been matched against each other, so neither team will be at the usual preseason disadvantage. And the winner of that matchup will be playing the Central American survivor (Olimpia-Saprissa), while the four Mexican representatives are slugging it out in their own side of the bracket. And given that both RSL (4-5, 3-1) and Columbus (0-1, 1-0, with the loss in Mexico due to bizarre circumstances) have played well against their Mexican foes in this tournament, either team would like their chances over a two-leg final. (Although RSL’s chances would probably be better — their core team seems less unsettled than the Crew, they play their home games at 4,450 ft (meaning they’d be in better shape if they have to return to Mexico City), and they’ve established a cast-iron home-field advantage.)
As for your comments about Mexico: it would seem that the Mexican league is likely the third-strongest in the Americas (after Brazil and Argentina); Mexican clubs (and not necessarily the strongest ones, either, as each season’s champions are required to enter CONCACAF competition) have managed two runner-up finishes in the Copa Libertadores (including Chivas in 2010), while finishing first once (Pachuca, 2006) and second twice in the Copa Sudamericana (when CONCACAF teams were invited to the tournament 2005-08).
Indeed, it’s probably more surprising than not that a Mexican team hadn’t previously made the breakthrough against the European/South American duopoly — perhaps if the Club World Cup were held somewhere other than Japan or the UAE? (As for TP Mazembe, which was the fluky performance: the win over Internacional (which had an indifferent domestic season), or the previous year’s loss to semipro Auckland City?)
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