What's The Point?
Bayern's 10-0 thrashing of Auckland shows why the expanded Club World Cup is nonsensical.
By Patric Ridge
Thomas Müller is leaving Bayern Munich soon enough.
But, like Luka Modric at Real Madrid, the veteran campaigner — winner of 13 Bundesliga titles, two Champions League trophies and a World Cup — is staying on for his soon-to-be former team’s FIFA Club World Cup campaign.
Bayern, and Müller, have won this tournament twice before, back in 2013 and 2020. On each of those occasions, they only had to play two matches. Should they win the competiton this time around, and with the money on offer, they will very much want to, then they will have to play seven matches.
Then again, Bayern could hardly have had an easier start than opening up Group C against semi-pro outfit Auckland City.
Auckland, the best team the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) has to offer, have actually made more Club World Cup appearances than any other team — but their players are not professionals. As has been well documented, some of them used up all of their annual leave allowance to skip out of their day jobs and head to the United States.
Müller grabbed Bayern’s 10th goal in a 10-0 rout on Sunday in Cincinnati, where one of Europe’s elite did what you would expect one of Europe’s elite to do against a part-time team.
That saw Mülller, who had scored late in the first half to make it 5-0, reach another milestone — 250 competitive goals for Bayern. “Competitive” is doing some heavy lifting when it comes to Sunday’s fixture, though.
There will be tougher tests to come for Bayern — Vincent Kompany was quick to point out that his team had taken the meeting with Auckland “seriously”, and that Bayern’s clash against Argentine giants Boca Juniors should be exciting to any football fan.
He’s not wrong, but the placement of this expanded competition, at the end of another draining season, which came straight off the back of two major international tournaments, means that all of it feels a bit ‘pre-season’ — at a time when everyone should just be enjoying a bit of downtime. Nobody should get that excited for pre-season friendlies. And who is really getting that excited for the Club World Cup?
Paris Saint-Germain vs Atletico Madrid should have been more competitive later in the day, but the European champions cruised to a 4-0 victory in the heat of Pasadena — a match played at midday West Coast time at the height of summer.
Bayern, meanwhile, will go down in history as having the biggest margin of victory in a Club World Cup match. Auckland’s players, while they will no doubt be thrilled to have gone up against Müller, Manuel Neuer, Harry Kane, Jamal Musiala, Michael Olise and the rest of Bayern’s stars, have not learned anything from getting hit for double figures.
What FIFA should learn — and probably won’t — is that this result proves that the expanded competition is a nonsense. Yet instead of streamlining it, Infantino has already mooted the potential for the tournament, backed by Saudi PIF money, to grow to 48 teams for the 2029 edition. Would you be at all surprised if that ends up being played in Saudi Arabia, too, causing huge disruption to the European calendar?
The clubs, of course, play their part too. They could have refused to play, citing player welfare concerns. But the money on offer is just too good — the champion could scoop just under £100million — no team is going to turn that down.
And so, we will wade through the next four weeks. There may be some interesting games, some interesting results. Botafogo beat the Seattle Sounders 2-1 on Sunday, in a game between two teams relatively more evenly matched. Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami drew 0-0 against Egypt’s Al Ahly in the opening match.
But 10-0 hammerings do nothing to pique any interest — it is not as though Bayern had to play well. This wasn’t Germany beating Brazil 7-1 at the 2014 World Cup; it was a team stocked full of top-tier players knocking it about against amateurs, and it was not good to watch.