The noise has been building for a month, intrusive and inescapable, unceasing and unapologetic. From the very start, the Club World Cup has been about telling, rather than showing. The trophy, Gianni Infantino told us, was the biggest, the best, quite unlike any other trophy around. The prize pot was $1 billion, the biggest, the richest. The tournament was a triumph, he declared, after the first game.
Such is the spirit of the times, or at least of the organisation. At a rare public appearance on the eve of the final, Infantino once again decreed that the inaugural edition of this expanded competition had been a “huge, huge, huge success.” There had been two to three billion viewers across the world, apparently. He is yet to show his working on that.
All of this reached its natural climax in the minutes before the tournament’s final: Robbie Williams in a gold lamé tracksuit, golden fireworks exploding at his back, three fighter jets shredding the sky above. It all went on for so long that kickoff was delayed for eight minutes, as though it was a shame all of the entertainment had to be interrupted by something so gauche as football.
In the circumstances, then, there is something intensely satisfying about the fact that the final – and the competition itself – was resolved by the intervention from a player who only shows, never tells. Cole Palmer is not a natural self-promoter. In public, at least, he rarely speaks for long enough to get around to boasting. Two years since his initial starburst, he still seems as bamboozled by and disinterested in the circus that surrounds football as ever.
Late on Friday night, for example, Palmer found himself under the bright lights of Times Square. He had spent the day at a photoshoot on top of the Rockefeller Center, sitting on a girder alongside Ousmane Dembélé, the green splash of Central Park unspooling at his back. His image has been flashing up on the billboards at 42nd Street for weeks. Palmer, though, did not seem to have noticed. He made his way through the throngs of tourists on a scooter.
Two days later, it was Palmer who decided that Chelsea should be champions of the world. Enzo Maresca’s team were considerable underdogs against Paris St-Germain, the reigning European champions and in most reasonable opinions the best side on the planet. Palmer, as ever, was completely unfazed.
He scored twice – scored the same goal twice, in fact – and then slipped Joao Pedro through to add a third, the game essentially finished as a contest inside the first half simply by the strength of Palmer’s will. FIFA has hoped, over the last month, that if they say something often enough they might make it true. Palmer’s approach is the opposite. He says as little as possible. He prefers, instead, to do.
Quite what he has achieved here is not easily gauged, not immediately. This tournament has felt inherently ersatz, an artificial construct, all of those bright lights and gold tints and fireworks designed to dazzle and to confuse. The temptation, given the cynicism of the marketing, is to treat it as a meaningless bauble, a corporate construct, an exercise in cynical commercialism but a political play, too.
Infantino’s greatest satisfaction is likely to be that he convinced President Donald Trump to help him hand the trophy to Reece James; so much did Trump seem to enjoy it that he insisted on staying in place while the players celebrated. (Infantino will have to find a way of ignoring the long, loud and repeated boos that greeted Trump’s appearance on the field and on the podium.)
That may, though, be a little too simplistic. At the final whistle, just as Infantino will have been hoping to receive some praise from Trump about the show he has created, a melée broke out on the field: Gianluigi Donnarumma appeared to strike Joao Pedro; Luis Enrique, the PSG coach, was involved, too; soon, almost every player was confronting an opponent. Chelsea were happy to win, obviously. That PSG were angry to lose is probably more significant.
In reality, PSG could have few complaints. They were a shadow of the side that had dismantled Real Madrid here earlier this week, nothing like the majestic team that humiliated Inter Milan in the Champions League final at the end of May.
Chelsea, by contrast, were coherent, organised, disciplined. Privately, they will probably acknowledge they remain a work in progress; over 90 minutes, they were richly deserved victors.
Three years into the uneasy joint ownership of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, the validity of Chelsea’s transfer strategy remains a matter of personal taste. Whether it should even be called a strategy, in fact, is probably debatable.
They have a pattern, of course. They have, for the last couple of years, focused almost exclusively on signing the young and the prodigiously gifted, and then tying them to improbably long contracts. In the eyes of the club’s executives, this is disruption in its most bold and brilliant form, a daring break from the restrictive traditions of an ossified industry.
To others, the interpretation is rather less kind. It is perfectly possible to look at Chelsea and see an extreme, but probably not isolated, example of good old-fashioned wantonness: the club has spent £1.4 billion on transfer fees alone in the years since their American owners arrived, and does not appear to have any intention of stopping.
Or it may be that Chelsea are pioneers of a more novel sort of high-wire act. The club’s stockpiling of players challenges not only conventional but economic wisdom. Last summer, Enzo Maresca had to exclude a number of players from training simply to make sessions manageable; there is likely to be a repeat whenever his squad returns from its long-delayed summer break.
Endlessly adding players reduces the value of those deemed surplus to requirements; Chelsea have already had to sell two hotels and their own women’s team to a sister company in order to make the numbers work. Even that was not enough to mollify UEFA, who fined them a minimum of £26.75 million for failing to comply with European football’s financial rules. Nobody disputes that the club’s owners are disruptors. Quite who they are disrupting is rather less clear.
That is not to say there have not been successes, Palmer prime among them. It is easy to overlook, now, but when he joined Chelsea, he was a 21-year-old who had featured only fleetingly for Manchester City and had failed to convince Pep Guardiola to give him the game time and the prominence he felt he deserved. When he left for Chelsea, City’s fans might have been forgiven for thinking it was rather a good deal.
Two years on, he is without question the club’s most marketable star, the sort of player Thomas Tuchel will be expected to place front and centre in his England team at next summer’s World Cup and, in his own understated, gnomic way, an engaging cult figure in the extended comic book universe of the Premier League. It is not just Palmer, though; there are others: Enzo Fernández, Moises Caicedo and, based on early impressions, Joao Pedro too. This is a club “building something special,” as Palmer said, after the game.
It is also a club that seems – whether by accident or design – to have recognised the way the game is going. It is no accident that these were the two youngest teams in the tournament; as the schedule gets busier, every summer filled by another competition, held in ever more exacting temperatures, youth will be more important than ever.
That is an advantage; so too is the size of Chelsea’s squad. Maybe their owners noticed that it is no longer possible to play a full campaign with just a couple of dozen players; more are necessary if energy levels are to be maintained, if standards are to be kept up. PSG, given their dominance of Ligue 1, might be able to rest a little during the season. Premier League sides cannot.
Maybe Chelsea, in that light, are not such unlikely champions of the world. This tournament is best regarded as an indication of where football is going off the pitch: a sport determined to squeeze every last breath out of itself, bankrolled by Saudi money and saturated to meet the demands of private equity. In Chelsea, for all the quiet wonder of Palmer, it has the perfect avatar for where it is going on it, too.
_Photograph by Sven Hoppe/dpa_