Barcelona '09 and '11, for starters. The Brazilian clubs that have won the CWC revered as world champions throughout Latin America the following year (given that they automatically qualify for the following Copa Libertadores as defending champions). Europeans may have a split opinion on how much credit to give to the accomplishments of Corinthians, São Paulo and Internacional, but for those who dismiss winning the CWC, the arguments lead nowhere - we're not going to see Brazilian clubs in the UEFA Champions League in our lifetime, so the question of whether they could "prove themselves" in that competition is a non-starter.
p Yeah, I am sure that is what Barcelona are remembered for! I am one of those who wants to give clubs from all over the world, outside of UEFA, a tournament which has the requisite profile and number of matches where they can genuinely show themselves better than those from Europe. Which is what informs my suggestion, and not the reverse. My comment about the Club World Cup title not being worth what is should be worth is descriptive, not normative. I am not saying that is how it should be. I want that title to mean something more than it does now.
You got to be kidding me, Barcelona under Guardiola ( perhaps the greatest club team the world has ever seen ) will certainly be remembered for many things but NOT for winning the World Club Cup. Look, we can debate all day whether or not European teams should take the competition more seriously or not but the simple fact is that currently they don't. And the reason is simple - the competition pales in comparison to the UEFA Champions League which is immensly exciting, full of matches that fans care about, great drama and a great presentation by UEFA ( the anthem, the show around it, the media package etc,).
2 world championships in a 2 year span is an insanely massive accomplishment. Very memorable. Comparing the UCL to the CWC is like comparing the first 80 minutes of a match to the final 10. It's pointless. They're part of the same process. Brasilians know what's up:
Perhaps. But Pep understood the importance of Barcelona winning the trophy for the first time in 2009. As a player he was part of the 1992 side that lost the Intercontinental Cup to Sao Paulo, and in the dressing room before the 2009 final he told his players that they would become "eternal" if they beat Estudiantes. It took an 88th minute equalizer and extra time for the job to get done, and although Iniesta's late goal at Stamford Bridge is most remembered it was winning the Club World Cup that made Pep lose control of his emotions.
Plus, there's a reason why Barça '09 are remembered as "the team that won everything", and the Club World Cup was the final piece to that historic accomplishment.
Yes, of course. Once players play in it they want to win it. No European team goes into it to lose it. But that doesn't mean it carries an importance that is comparable to the UCL. The public in Europe barely notices the event. I live in England and despite 17 dedicated sports channels in this country ( and regular channels that also show sport such as the BBC) not one channel shows even one minute of the Club World Cup this week. Sad but true.
Full Game: 2006 Fifa Club World Cup Final - Inter x Barcelona I was there. Best trip I ever took! This 2006 Barcelona was supposed to run over Inter in this final. In the Semi Barça destroyed Mexico's Americ 4-0 and Inter squeaked by Al Ahly 2 x 1. Notibly the Al Ahly game was Alexandre Pato's 2nd Professional match. Barça would be his 3rd. But the easy win for Barça over America probably made them enter the final thinking the title was a forgone conclusion. Meanwhile Inter struggled against Al Ahly possibly for those same reasons. Inter was thinking about Barcelona. 4 years later Inter would pay for tis type of thinking in the Semi's of the same tournament. So in the final what we had was an extremely finely tuned and united Internacional and a Barcelona that was called a superteam, but that probably didn't expect much from Inter. Every second of this game was torture for me. I was sitting behind the goal on the left side of the screen with about another 3000 Internacional fans that made the long trip from various parts of the world. Here is the whole game as called by Brazil's TV Globo. @SoccerScout - you don't have to start the exact same thread every year. Moved to general CWC discussion.
I've heard that often from English fans. They don't care, they'd rather watch the FA Cup. The English regular folk seem to be very provincial, not unlike the Americans. They seem not to care much about the rest of the world. They might be somewhat aware of Western Europe, like Americans are somewhat aware of Mexico and Canada, but beyond that, as far as they are concerned it's "the wild". England is sort of like "The Shire". Their loss, I suppose.
Barca wanted to win. They wanted to win it all. If that last competition was the U 17 women's champions league they would have given their best to win that too. They got all their pokemons
But how important is the label "the team that won everything"? Sure you want to win everything, but the 2010-11 Barca team is generally considered by experts to have been a better team than the one that "won everything" in 2008-9.
Here's a thread from years ago about how South Americans and Europeans differ on this tournament. I'm not European, but I do believe that Europeans, and particularly the English due to the insularity of their country, are far more inwardly focused than the rest of the world. I also do believe (however a stretch this might be) that Italian and Spaniard teams appear to celebrate CWC title victories more aggressively because the teams they defeat (Brazilian or Argentine for the most part) are from nations where their own ancestors moved to and in some cases took a large part in establishing. The English, Dutch, and Germans have far less of a historical connection to South America. Here's a post I wrote years ago in that thread; I stand by these sentiments. I read somewhere that this is more than just football when it comes to fans' psychology. It's as if South Americans feel that by winning on the pitch, they are striking back at the one-time colonizers of their continent. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, South America's equivalent of the Champions' League means, in English, "Liberators of America." There couldn't be more of a direct allusion to the nationalist leaders of the former Spaniard colonies who rose up against imperial rule and led the new peoples to self-determination. Oddly enough, Italy, Germany, and England never had colonies in South America (other than the Falklands/Malvinas, but they're a possession of the UK). Now, if Atl.-MG faces Bayern Munich and wins, its celebration will have nothing to do with colonization or history, especially as Germany didn't colonize what is now Brazil. Atl.-MG will celebrate because it'll crown a golden year and make them world champions. And while there's no argument that winning both the Libertadores and the CL is more difficult than winning a two-match tournament (for UEFA and CONMEBOL teams), the fact that a Atl.-MG title victory, achieved over the amazing squad of Bayern Munich (who destroyed Barcelona), will always be remembered in the annals of Atl.-MG's - and Brazilian - soccer.
I presumed this kind of response would crop up, so I took a look at a few Italian Calcio sites yesterday. Only one of them even mentioned the Club World Cup. Aside from Serie A, the overwhelming focus was on the Champions League draw. Those "provincial" Italians...
Barça 08-09 are the only team in the history of football to lay claim to that title - I'll leave it at that. To be fair, Guyana and Suriname are former English and Dutch colonies (respectively); but I don't see Manchester United-Alpha United or Ajax Amsterdam-Inter Moengotapoe in the CWC happening anytime soon. As a comparison, how active were they during the last UEFA Champions League final?
It's something to recognize for sure. Still... people consider the 2010-11 Barca team to be stronger despite not winning everything. And being the only team to win everything is something the Barca 08-09 team will only be able to lay claim to for a few more years at the most, so....
Just when I thought we could skip the "how is the CWC seen in England" discussion for a change. Anyway, I've been following the German media coverage quite closely this year. The treatment of the competition has been respectful, with the intent to inform, and while it is mentioned that the competition is valued more highly elsewhere I don't see anyone going out of their way to slam the tournament. I imagine the coverage is similar in Spain and Italy. The same can't always be said about the English media (and I get it, part of that is the lack of winter break in the Premier League and the "disruption" the CWC causes with an English participant)
I suppose to some extent if you are a fan of a club from a country that has one of the wealthiest leagues and some of the wealthiest clubs that can afford to sign the most famous players/celebrities, then it probably doesn't pay to care too much. If you win, you're supposed to win, and if you lose it's a big choke, so why get emotionally invested? But I don't hear the Germans going out of their way to tell the rest of the world that "we don't care". It's the English mostly who do that. It's sort of like the American sports fans on sports talk radio going on and on about how "we don't care about soccer, really we don't. We dont!!!". Okay fine, but if you don't care, there's no need for you to go out of your way to tell everybody else that you don't care. The rest of the world cares.
Here's today's football page in The Guardian. No mention of the CWC in its "World football" section, so no "going out of its way to tell everybody else that it doesn't care". And plenty of non-English news on there:- Italy, Spain, Germany, Croatia, Brasil etc. so you can hardly accuse them of being "provincial". A rather large generalization. I'd say a specific European country cares when one of its teams is playing in it, but not otherwise.
I agree that 2011 Barca was stronger, and part of that reason was how they dominated at the CWC, whereas 09 Barca was minutes from elimination. I don't think supercups add much to a team's claim to greatness, they're just pre/early season exhibitions, basically. Bold prediction. I assume you're predicting a German club to win the sextuple soon.
Bayern no longer can win the 'sextuple'. The CWC would be their fifth trophy of the year but they lost the German Supercup.
Not that bold. Already 2 teams have come very close since 2009 (both Inter and Bayern were only 1 game away from accomplishing the same thing). So seems like just a matter of time. Barca 2010-11 was considered stronger because of games like the 5-0 against Madrid, Messi's brilliance in the Champions League, the dominance over Man Utd in the CL final, winning La Liga so easily, etc. The CWC had very little to do with it, especially since it takes place in a different season.
I know. Their hashtag right now is #Mission5 because they are going for the Quintuple. The poster in question made the prediction for the next few years, not this year. https://plus.google.com/s/#Mission5 It's still a pretty bold prediction because the Sextuple is extremely difficult to win. Plus, since supercups aren't that important, you can't blame a strong team for not winning them.
One essential key vital factor that most of you outside of brazil also dont take into account is that in the 1970s and first couple of years in the 80s Brazilian teams didnt take the Libertadores very seriously. Believe it or not even state championships in brazil were more sought afetr than the libertadores. So south america in many cases werent even sending their best to the continental cup. No offense to the argentines and uruguayans that won the libertadores i those year but the fact is brazil had some amazing teams in those years and as you can see few of them won the libertadores. They just didnt care. All brazilian clubs back then were stacked with stars. The 74-76 Internacional for example was a powerhouse with the likes of Falcao, valdomiro, manga, figueroa, jair, batista, dario etc. inter won the brazilian championship in 75 and 76 (and should have won in 74) and were almost an unbeatlble team. But came libertadores and they just didnt care or try. I remember when Inter won the 1979 brazilian championship undefeated, the only one to do so to this day, in the 1980 libertadores it wasnt a big deal. Nacional of uruguay tied inter 0x0 at the beira rio and won in montevideo 1x0. Inter made the final and i remember the fans being ho hum about it. It wasnt until flamengo won it in 81 that suddenly everyone else wanted to win it too and brazilians started taking the libertadores more seriously.
I don't get why they don't treat them better. They are all a one match trophy. Even the CWC itself is basically a 2 game trophy (for the UEFA and CONMEBOL rep)