STRIKERS scoring against their former club is a story as old as time. Many would have expected Joao Pedro’s first such moment for his new team, Chelsea, to come against Brighton, in one of the many games English football serves up in its three domestic competitions each season. But, instead, it came against Fluminense, the team with whom he played in Rio De Janeiro as a youth and where he made his senior professional debut aged 17.

“When I was young, I had nothing. They gave everything to me,” Joao Pedro said of Fluminense after scoring twice against them. “They showed me to the world. If I’m here, it’s because they believed in me.”

The goals meant Chelsea progressed to Sunday’s Club World Cup final in New Jersey, and in doing so, knocked out the only non-European team left in the tournament.

Though the final will be contested between two European teams, the successful elements of this tournament have been due to the teams from other regions.

Joao Pedro himself likely never thought he would be in a situation where the obligatory non-celebration after scoring against a former team was against Fluminense, so rare it is that a European team plays one from Brazil.

“I’ve got mixed feelings,” Joao Pedro told Fifa. “I apologise for the two goals. This is my job. I’m sad to see some of the players I played alongside, and some of the staff I know are upset. Seeing their sadness is difficult because I know this was their dream.”

The striker hints at the fact that many non-European teams hold this tournament in much higher regard than their Uefa counterparts. While Uefa has its own behemoth of a tournament in its Champions League, which is one of the most popular and most watched football tournaments in the world, teams from other regions, especially the winners of South America’s regional championship, the Copa Libertadores, set their sights on testing themselves against these Uefa sides in Club World Cups.

As a result, the newly expanded Club World Cup has been boosted by its South American presence, and indeed by teams from other non-Uefa confederations. It showed the positives of bringing these clubs together for competitive matches.

Ahead of the semi-final, the tricolour shirts of Fluminense filled New York’s public transport systems en route to New Jersey. Their combination of analogue colours, naturally retro, rustic, but producing something distinctive when the burgundy, dark green, and white combine, blended in with the subway and transit system, which itself retains a retro feel in parts, and nods to its history.

Palmeiras brought something similar with their distinctive green in the quarter-finals, while during the group stages, teams from around the world brought their own diverse style in a celebration of this global game.

But there are negatives to go alongside those positives, and the Club World Cup has deserved the criticism aimed in its direction. 

Issues including player workload, dynamic ticket pricing, an unhealthy association with the politics of Donald Trump (which have at times bordered on endorsement), and Saudi Arabia’s continued involvement via various routes of sponsorship hang over the tournament.

Once it gets going, the sport of football is invariably good, and the Club World Cup, as an overall idea — that of club teams from different continents getting a rare chance to test themselves against each other — is a good one.

But this inevitable popularity and success of any form of competitive football is the reason these negative elements are attracted to the sport in the first place, as they look to use it for their own ends. And why it often works as such a tool.

The use of the United States as a host country, where there are fewer regulations on ticket reselling, and the state-ownership of clubs and sponsorship of tournaments is criticised, but the football carries on and is enjoyed. It’s a difficult sport to boycott, which is why it is a prime target for entities with ulterior motives and why the idea of sportswashing exists in it.

The fact that the Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain are starting to gain plaudits and admirers due to their recent success has also shown as much.

Big games will also attract ticket buyers even at high prices. Again, this is one of the reasons Fifa is currently favouring the United States as a host country despite its public transport limitations in many cities and more serious immigration and visa issues. 

The semi-finals at the much-maligned Meadowlands stadium in New Jersey, which will also host the World Cup final next year, drew attendances of 70,556 for Fluminense versus Chelsea and 77,542 for Real Madrid against Paris Saint-Germain.

The dynamic pricing in play saw ticket prices fluctuate ahead of these games, and meant people in the same area of the stadium would have paid prices varying by as much as hundreds of dollars.

This tournament has shown that dynamic pricing leads to ticket price drops as well as increases, but it doesn’t seem right that the prices differ so much from one seat to the next in the same area for what should be a communal event.

Fifa is bouncing back and forth between the unfettered capitalism of the United States and the sovereign wealth of oppressive states. Even the 2022 Club World Cup, hosted in Morocco, was heavily sponsored by Saudi Arabia, and the last of the then-yearly Club World Cup tournaments to be held outside of the Middle East was 2016 in Japan, nine editions ago.

While this kind of world club tournament has an appeal which will likely increase as the years go by, and this one has been more successful as a footballing spectacle than many predicted, the underlying, or rather overlying, obvious issues cannot be forgotten.

Performances and stories such as Joao Pedro’s, and the link he provided between Fluminense and Chelsea, plus the performances in the stands of the fans from around the world, show the attraction to and benefits of such a diverse celebration of a truly global game. But like much of the rest of football, it is not immune to being exploited by outside influences, and these should not be ignored just because the football was inevitably good.