Matt Maher: Club World Cup risks being a very expensive Fifa own goal

With apologies to whoever first came up with the familiar and more famous philosophical thought involving trees and woods, it was the first thing which occurred when rising on Tuesday morning to discover Pep Guardiola’s team had been beaten by a Ruben Neves-inspired Al-Hilal in a match which concluded around 4.30am UK time.

In this instance of course, there were actually people who saw it. More than 42,000 of them, to be precise, were there in person inside Orlando’s Camping World Stadium to witness what technically was a piece of football history and in any normal terms would be described as a considerable shock.

Except there is nothing which feels particularly normal about the Club World Cup and neither is it particularly easy to paint Al-Hilal, the first Asian team to defeat an English one in a competitive fixture, as plucky underdogs. After all their owners, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, also own the tournament broadcasters without whom the whole thing probably wouldn’t be taking place. 

Neves, meanwhile, is believed to be on a salary of nearly £300,000-a-week. Granted, Jack Grealish, a player who didn’t even make City’s travelling squad, is on more but it is hard to get too worked up about a contest which essentially pitted one very rich state-owned club against another.

Defeat certainly doesn’t seem to have hit City supporters too hard. Coming against unfamiliar opposition, in an unfamiliar competition, on the other side of an ocean at a time when the vast majority of the UK public were sound asleep, that’s understandable. 

Having attended a function on Tuesday evening where several City fans were present, the general view was going out of the tournament might instead work to their favour in providing their players more time to rest ahead of a new Premier League season now just six weeks away. None, meanwhile, had felt engaged enough to suffer sleep deprivation by watching the match itself.

Guardiola, of course, failed with a request for his team’s opening domestic fixtures to be postponed. 

That was hardly surprising. With City and Chelsea having already gained an advantage off the field by banking tens of millions in Club World Cup prize money, their rivals were hardly going to grant them help on the pitch by removing the biggest drawback to participating in the competition.

But that’s not to say he didn’t have a point, or that there aren’t some very serious concerns over how the seemingly non-stop schedule will impact player welfare.

They were raised most forcefully this week by Jurgen Klopp, who branded the Club World Cup “the worst idea ever implemented in football”.

"I have serious fears, that players will suffer injuries they've never had before next season,” said the former Liverpool boss. “If not next season, then it will happen at the World Cup or afterwards.

"We constantly expect the players to go into every game as if it were their last. We tell them that 70 or 75 times a year. But it can't go on like this.

"We have to make sure they have breaks, because if they don't get them, they won't be able to deliver top performances - and if they can't achieve that anymore, the entire product loses value."

Klopp took aim at the tournament despite one of the clubs he now oversees in his role as Red Bull’s head of global soccer, RB Salzburg, actually playing in it.

Like most football managers, the German has always had a healthy habit of changing his argument when it suits but in this instance, it is hard to dispute his point.

When someone who has managed top level players for the past decade-and-a-half starts saying such things, maybe it is time people started listening.

So far the players' own warnings have fallen on deaf ears, despite the global players’ union Fifpro actually filing a legal complaint last year against Fifa’s “abuse of dominance” - specifically related to the Club World Cup - with the European Commission.

PFA chief executive Maheta Molango echoed Klopp when he claimed the tournament was “devaluing football” due to the problems which have included low crowds, high temperatures and thunderstorms which have forced matches to be suspended. In the case of Chelsea’s knockout tie with Benfica, the delay was more than two hours.

None of this, of course, will be considered a problem by Fifa themselves. At least, not in public.

We can already predict what Gianni Infantino will be saying when the tournament concludes next weekend. The words “great” and “success” are guaranteed to appear close together.

Yet even Infantino, deep down, must have some concerns.

In some ways, it is hard not to smile at the irony. Remember all the controversy when the 2022 tournament went to Qatar? The outrage at a winter World Cup to avoid the oppressive heat?

Nobody considered for even a second the North American summer might also be a tad on the warm side, despite Jack Charlton famously warning players lives were at risk when the US first hosted the tournament in 1994.

Yet one year out from the next World Cup, the conditions are now very much a worry, having been placed centre stage by a competition no-one bar a few Fifa bigwigs and some greedy club owners actually wanted.

Earlier this week a scientist told the BBC next year’s final should kick-off at 9am local time, in order to better protect players.

Like so much related to the Club World Cup, it almost sounds farcical but in truth there is nothing funny about it. Fifa may yet find they have scored a rather expensive own goal.