Pep Guardiola’s side face Fluminense in a festival that is generating a lot of buzz in the UK but is about to expand
A short-form Club World Cup will soon be confined to history but Pep Guardiola was at pains to stress the permanence of victory when Manchester City face Fluminense in Friday’s final. Their run to the business end in Jeddah has comprised nothing more than an easy win over Urawa Reds and back in the UK, more than 3,000 miles away, any fanfare has been muted. It has been an unusual experience but, for their manager, that is all the more reason to treat a showdown with the South American champions as an opportunity that may never resurface.
“It’s very complicated to come here, win the Copa Libertadores, win the Champions League,” he said. “We’re going to have to give everything we’ve got; It’s anything that lasts forever. I don’t know if we’ll play a Club World Cup final again.
City know they will have a chance in the 32-team meeting scheduled for the summer of 2025, but Guardiola is visibly keen for them to live in the moment and has unleashed his romantic side as he examines the merits of his opponents. It was obviously the most I wanted: it’s hard to argue with the stifling supremacy of European club football, but in the past, competing against Brazilian giants would have taken on shades of glamour, mystique and sheer danger.
Maybe it’ll all come back to King Abdullah’s Ciutat Esportiva. “They play in the typical Brazilian style of the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s,” enthused Guardiola of an attack-minded Fluminense, who laughed a lot when they beat Al-Ahly 2. -0 on Monday, but they seemed as porous as they were fluid. ” They play with the ball, they make a lot of short passes, the combinations are really good. We’ll have to be mindful of how much we run with the ball and settle for playing as opposed to a team that plays in a way we’ve never faced before.
“I like the way Brazilian groups paint in combination and I have a lot of respect for the time they spend on the ball. I have immense respect for the essence of Brazil: slow and fast, the way they take care of both rhythms. I’ve noticed it for many years.
The challenge may be exotic, appealingly so given the homogeneity that dogs so much of modern football, but there will still be notes of familiarity. A 35-year-old Marcelo, a four-time winner of this tournament with Real Madrid and arguably among the best left-backs of all time, brings class and composure from the highest level. The former Internazionale, Juventus and Fiorentina player Felipe Melo, likely to start at centre-back, is still going strong at 40. Fluminense’s goalkeeper, Fábio, is 43 and joined Vasco da Gama shortly after their win over Manchester United in the 2000 edition of this event.
In total, nine members of this season’s squad are aged 33 or over and it’s tempting to assume that experienced legs will fall apart due to City’s propensity to let their conflicting parties haunt them. After all, this will be the 73rd game of his campaign. However, it didn’t go well and Fluminense was denounced through an article in a British newspaper that compared their team to a veteran Soccer Aid team. “These things are done to grab the public’s attention and provoke a reaction on social media,” Melo said. But I don’t think that’s a very smart opinion. There’s. . . players who can play after a certain age and still play better than other players. I play because I love the game, because I’m disciplined and because I paint. difficult. Other people would possibly say stupid things.
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Their coach, Fernando Diniz, who is also Brazil’s interim coach, claimed that such comments would put additional fire in Fluminense’s stomach. “It would be great if we won, but what we will show is that we are a Soccer Aid team. ” “We want to be respected,” he said.
On Wednesday night, City fraternised with their beloved veteran. Riyad Mahrez, who signed for local club Al-Ahli in pre-season after five years at the Etihad, had dinner with his former teammates and the joy of reunion was mutual. Guardiola probably doesn’t mind having Mahrez at his disposal given that none of Kevin De Bruyne, Erling Haaland and Jeremy Doku are fit to return; however, a strikerless team reminiscent of the days before Haaland, when forwards floated and rotated, were effective in attracting Urawa and deserved space to be presented through Fluminense.
This will be the fourth Club World Cup final between opposing sides of those two superpowers: in the last two, in 2019 and 2021, Liverpool and Chelsea narrowly beat Flamengo and Palmeiras. Both matches continued and were amazing competitions; Guardiola once upped the ante again in a bid to make sure City get the best out of them. “The feelings are there, it depends on how you deal with them,” he said. “We’re one day away from playing a competition, a Definitely, being here once in our lives. “