Sixty-two games down, one game to go, 192 goals scored and almost 2.5million people through the turnstiles. The Club World Cup has thrown up more questions than answers, but when it comes to identifying the best team on the planet right now, there is surely no debate.
Any lingering doubts were blown away in the stifling heat of East Rutherford, New Jersey, as Paris Saint-Germain stunned Real Madrid and their vast ranks of supporters by rushing into a 2-0 lead inside the first nine minutes of Wednesday’s semi-final.
The piece de resistance came in the 24th minute, a flowing move that ended with Achraf Hakimi charging down the right wing and finding Fabian Ruiz for a sublime third goal.
Fabian Ruiz scores PSG’s third goal (Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)
It felt like FIFA could have crowned PSG as world champions there and then — even if there was more than an hour to play against Madrid, even if there is still a final to come against Chelsea on Sunday. Since the turn of the year they have scaled heights that have surprised even their coach Luis Enrique, winning the club’s first Champions League title in spectacular style and now looking hell-bent on doing the same with the Club World Cup. Fabian Ruiz called their 4-0 victory “perfect”. Luis Enrique preferred “beautiful”.
PSG’s “flashy bling bling” period, as described by their president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, saw them land some of the game’s glitziest stars — Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi, to name the obvious three — but not the shiniest trophies, as successive coaches struggled with the egos and the individualistic tendencies of so many big-name players.
By contrast, the young, new-look squad assembled shrewdly by sporting director Luis Campos and coached expertly by Luis Enrique has become what the latter calls a “reference” for other teams. They have a midfield that passes the ball beautifully and fights tigerishly to win it back when they lose it, full-backs and wingers who are quick and enterprising in everything they do. They lost Mbappe, their all-time record goalscorer, to Madrid last summer, but in his absence the team has become so much more balanced, a model of cohesion and on-pitch chemistry.
The contrast with Real Madrid’s journey over the same period is hard to resist. This time last year the Spanish club were champions of Europe, but something has gone awry over the past 12 months. If this tournament is to be seen as signalling the end of last season — as their new coach Xabi Alonso was understandably keen to suggest — then it was a campaign in which they lost 15 games out of 68 in all competitions, as opposed to just two defeats in 55 the season before.
Sections of the crowds at this tournament have appeared more fixated on individuals than on the team, which is perhaps not surprising when FIFA have individual player walk-outs before kick-off. Almost without exception, the Madrid players were more loudly received at MetLife Stadium, with the biggest cheers of all coming for Jude Bellingham, Vinicius Jnr and Mbappe. But the cult of the individual is anathema to most modern coaches: even if the players are supremely talented soloists, like PSG wingers Desire Doue and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, they are expected to work relentlessly for the team.
Desire Doue is a star turn but is still expected to work hard for his team (Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
“It’s the collective effort,” midfielder Fabian Ruiz told reporters after collecting his player of the match award. “We have excellent players, but without the collective, we are not much.”
Alonso, given the nature of his coaching success at Bayer Leverkusen, will no doubt make the same demands in Madrid. He spoke of PSG performing at a “top top level” in the second half of the season and how his team were “not the first ones to have a heavy defeat against them”. His goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois was, characteristically, more blunt, calling the defeat a “slap” and saying, “We weren’t even close to their level”.
There is much to consider for Alonso, who must find a way to harness the talents of Bellingham, Mbappe, Vinicius Jnr and others without overindulging them. It is a very different challenge to the one he rose to so impressively at Leverkusen.
Mbappe is a wonderful footballer, who scored 44 goals in all competitions in his first season at Madrid, but his arrival has not made them stronger. Sometimes, through little no fault of their own, big-name players can overshadow team-mates in a way that affects harmony and upsets a balance both in the dressing room and on the pitch.
Sometimes when that big-name player departs, it can be liberating. Ousmane Dembele, who scored just six goals in all competitions in his first season at the club, is perhaps the ultimate example of a PSG player who has come out of his shell since Mbappe left the club.
There can be a danger in forgetting how good PSG were at times over the previous decade, both before and after Mbappe arrived from Monaco in 2017. But they were never anything like the irresistible force they became en route to last season’s Champions League triumph, overwhelming Manchester City at the Parc des Princes and then eliminating Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal — albeit with a few scares along the way — and then thrashing Internazionale 5-0 in the most one-sided final in the competition’s history.
Winning the biggest competition in European football was a quest that consumed PSG from the moment the club was bought by Qatar Sports Investments in 2011 — as, indeed, it consumed Chelsea from the moment they were bought by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in 2003. Winning the Club World Cup, even in its new format, is not going to resonate in the same way for either club, much as FIFA president Gianni Infantino might try to protest otherwise.
The Club World Cup already existed, as an annual tournament between the champions of FIFA’s six confederations, but Infantino says its expansion allows us to find out definitively, “for the first time”, which team is the world’s best.
The logic is flawed. Knock-out tournaments have never been regarded as great barometers of the state of the game. Beyond that, the “32 best teams in the world” claim is unequivocally wrong. Barcelona, Liverpool and Napoli, the champions of Spain, England and Italy, did not qualify. With the greatest respect to Wydad AC, Esperance de Tunis, Red Bull Salzburg, Inter Miami and others, nobody would suggest they are among the world’s 32 strongest teams.
Luis Enrique has turned PSG into a formidable machine (Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
There are times when the claim to be the world’s best team is fiercely contested, regardless of which one might be Europe’s reigning champion. But sometimes it is blindingly obvious, like when Barcelona were sweeping all before them under Pep Guardiola in the late 2000s and early 2010s— and again a few years later under Luis Enrique — and when Manchester City scaled great heights under Guardiola more recently. This feels like one such time.
That is not to say that Sunday’s final is a formality, but Chelsea’s coach Enzo Maresca would not claim his team are at the same stage in their development. Chelsea are still trying to find out what works and to build consistency, whereas at PSG everything seems to run so smoothly: the way they press the opposition to win the ball back, the way they pass, the way their full backs break forward, the way Dembele and the rest of the forwards are so incisive in the final third.
It isn’t just the results. It’s the way they have performed from the moment 2025 began. On the pitch they are setting the highest of standards. This has felt like their year, their time, a young team at the peak of its powers, setting a daunting standard for other teams to try to live up to. Even measuring up to them on a one-off basis, as Chelsea will try to do Sunday, looks hard enough.
(Top photo: Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
