That was the perfect ending for the Club World Cup, with its perfect winners.
It’s no slur on Chelsea, but had Paris Saint-Germain won as the current champions of Europe this cursed tournament would have been handed a slice of legitimacy it absolutely did not deserve. Crowning what is by common consent the actual best team in the world as world champions wouldn’t have done at all.
Chelsea have clearly become a very good team over the last year. With the very, very surprising emphasis being on ‘team’. Enzo Maresca has done something quite remarkable on that front, and most terrifying of all there appears to be a genuine coherent throughline to their transfer business this summer that simply won’t do at all.
Yes, Chelsea are once again an excellent team. But they are also still, luckily for us all, a hilarious winner of this tournament. A team that qualified in the first place based on what an almost entirely different group of players – with all due deference to the second best footballer in his family Reece James – did over four years ago. A Chelsea team whose joint top scorers that season were Tammy Abraham and Timo Werner.
Chelsea have just finished a distant fourth best in the Premier League, and their last game in the actual best club football tournament in the world was a 2-0 home defeat to Real Madrid in the quarter-finals in April 2023.
Again, there is no attack on Chelsea here. Just on their situation. Any team being crowned world champions from that baseline would have been ideal, and that’s before we even get to the fact Chelsea also won it by making a mess of the group stage and Southgating themselves into the easy half of the draw.
Having negotiated Benfica, Palmeiras and Fluminense, Chelsea then completed their perfect heist by utterly and entirely dismantling PSG in thrilling, Cole Palmer-inspired style in the final. If you’d wanted to script the Club World Cup, you’d have come up with something like this. Chelsea played the perfect long-con and one of the richest clubs in the world scurries off with the gold while everyone else looks the other way. Maresca’s Eleven, if you will.
But the class of Chelsea’s performance in that final has been covered. The real fun began after the game, with clear reminders that it’s not Chelsea who have pulled off a crime here.
We have become instantly and entirely obsessed with the sheer insanity of that trophy lift. A tournament that has seen football packaged up and sold wholesale to Saudi Arabia ended with Donald Trump getting a big slice of the pie and turning the whole thing into the MAGA World Cup.
The sight of Gianni Infantino desperately trying to drag Trump away from Chelsea’s trophy lift but succeeding only in being dragged further into the situation himself entirely against his will was, if anything, Clive, almost too on the nose as a metaphor.
Too late to save the day, Infantino was left wondering if this tournament, his brainchild and legacy, might have already grown out of his control. Today, I feel…played.
Trump enthusiastically and guilelessly joining in with Chelsea’s celebrations entirely unencumbered by the slightest hint of self-awareness will be the defining moment of this tournament. The image that will always first be associated with the first big Club World Cup jamboree will be Trump celebrating like he’d won the thing himself while Cole Palmer looks on slightly confused.
We can help you out, Cole; it was Home Alone 2.
Trump even appeared to help himself to a winner’s medal at one point – thanks, Noni Madueke! – to complete his absolute p*sstake takeover of proceedings. Not even Salt Bae thought he deserved an actual medal after the 2022 World Cup.
For Chelsea, this may well be a springboard to greater, more meaningful things. While it doesn’t do to get carried away in July, there’s also no denying these games have been one step up from your regular pre-season friendlies and the Blues have absolutely positioned themselves now as genuine contenders to become the latest team to push Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal into second place in the Premier League.
But the Orange One’s domination of the post-match celebrations and Infantino’s utter inability to retain any semblance of control were clear if dizzyingly weird and axis-shifting reminders that this tournament itself was never, ever about the football.
