It's fitting that Pedro Rodriguez and
Lionel Messi scored the goals that carried Barcelona to a 2-1 overtime victory over Estudiantes de La Plata in Saturday's FIFA Club World Cup Final, a game that cemented the greatest year for a single team in the history of organized sports.
In Wednesday's semifinal defeat of Cancun's Atlante, Pedro became the first player to score in six separate club competitions in a given season. On Saturday in Abu Dhabi, his looping 89th-minute header drew Barcelona level with an Estudiantes side that took a shocking first-half lead then spent nearly an hour holding on for dear life.
Twenty minutes into extra time, the world's best player clinched the trophy for the Catalans. Defender Dani Alves whipped a cross toward the six-yard line, and the irrepressible Messi slipped behind two defenders and chested the ball past goalkeeper Damian Albil.
One player symbolizes Barca's unprecedented haul of honors in 2009: the Spanish league, cup and super cup, the UEFA Champions League and Super Cup, and now the Club World Cup. The other symbolizes the peerless style with which it accomplished the feat. Messi is the best player in the world, and
Barcelona plays soccer with a commitment to creativity, skill and precision and homegrown player development that represents everything great about the sport. They were justly rewarded on Saturday against a team that put up a far greater fight than Manchester United managed in Rome seven months ago.
Barcelona surely will continue to play their game, but we may never see a year like this again. Even coach Pep Guardiola knows that. In a pre-match news conference, he told reporters that Barca's "future is dark," and that "beating this [year] is impossible." The magnitude of the accomplishment surely set in following the final whistle on Saturday, when TV cameras caught the manager in full-blown tears.
And that emotion is yet another indication that Barcelona seems to get just about everything right. They clearly wanted to win this tournament. Players always throw out all the same cliches beforehand, but Barca was not paying lip service to a world title. Their desperation to tie the game, relief when they did and joy when they won revealed a genuine desire to be champions. It was the only major trophy not sitting in the Camp Nou museum.
FIFA's annual competition, which opened itself to the hinterlands beyond Europe and South America in 2005, continues to be dismissed by a significant number of people. It's far less prestigious than the Champions League, some say. Asian, African and CONCACAF teams can't compare, others argue. It's a time-waster in an already crowded calendar, the executives who schedule lucrative offseason tours in America and Asia would have you believe.
In the big picture, all of that is nonsense. England had no interest in the World Cup when it started, thinking they shouldn't have to stoop to proving their obvious superiority. The NFL thought the same of the AFL. U.S. basketball people believed it. That sense of exclusion, of arbitrarily dismissing the competitive ambitions of a certain segment based on pedigree, goes against everything sport stands for. It's why we hate the BCS. It's why we romanticize the FA Cup and the NCAA tournament. Everyone deserves a chance, and any true sportsman would jump at the opportunity to earn a legitimate, rather than a mythical, world championship.
In addition, the super clubs of Europe that so many insist are above slogging it out with African or Latin American teams are rife with talent only because they plunder it from those regions of the world. If clubs in England, Spain and Italy are so inherently superior, let them enter the Champions League without their Argentines, Brazilians and West Africans. To make use of the human resources of those parts of the world, then deny the clubs that develop those players an opportunity to compete for a world title, would be borderline immoral.
The Club World Cup is one thing that FIFA actually gets right. Every continent is represented. It's brief and easy to follow. The European and South American teams get the bye they deserve, and the other continents get a seat the table and the opportunity to pull the upset of a lifetime. And if you believe that's not going to happen, you're kidding yourself. At some point, a Japanese or MLS or Mexican or Nigerian team is going to make the final. That's the inevitable evolution of sport, and it should serve as a real motivator for the elevation of the club game in the U.S. to international standards.
Give the competition time. It'll get there. People thought the Super Bowl and Champions League were dumb ideas when they launched as well.
Saturday wasn't perfect. For some dumb reason neither team wore their iconic uniform. Instead of being treated to the Blue-and-Red vs. the Red-and-White, we were forced to watch Barcelona in that hideous orange/pink and Estudiantes in another boring all-white kit. Even worse, Thierry Henry is wearing a gold medal. Mr. "I am not a cheat and never have been" punctuated a listless performance with a pathetic 82nd minute dive just outside the Estudiantes penalty area, for which he was justifiably booked. Henry is more than a cheat. He's a disgrace.
But those are about the only negatives that can be conjured. A legitimate global competition that will continue to grow in stature and competitiveness produced a champion for the ages. It's hard to ask for anything more than that.
