Despite endless complaints, Chelsea's talent endured at Club World Cup, and Europe will win it

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — To Chelsea coach Enzo Maresca, the “environment” in Atlanta was “strange.” Training was “impossible” in the Philadelphia heat. Weather delays in Charlotte and elsewhere were “a joke.” The United States in general, he said, was “probably not the right place to do this competition.” He complained and complained throughout this Club World Cup, and on Tuesday here at MetLife Stadium, his team advanced to the final.

They advanced because they are Chelsea, one of the 10 richest clubs in soccer, and their opponent was Fluminense from Brazil.

They advanced because they’ve spent $1.9 billion on players since the summer of 2022, reloading and reinforcing one of the deepest squads in the sport.

And they advanced because, just last week, they paid around $75 million for a new striker, João Pedro — more money than Fluminense made over the entirety of last year.

They advanced because, at every single position on the field, they were better.

“We gave our best,” Fluminense midfielder Nonato said postgame. “But we have to recognize that they have a really good team.”

Nonato sounded defeated, defeated by Chelsea’s unending firepower, firepower that we all overlooked in part because, up until Tuesday, the juiciest story of Chelsea’s Club World Cup was the complaints.

Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca reacts after defeating Fluminense in a Club World Cup semifinal soccer match in East Rutherford, N.J., Tuesday, July 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Maresca seemed to embody and embolden European criticism of this novel tournament. Even on the eve of Chelsea’s semifinal, he moaned about the long, grueling season that his players have endured — one that the Club World Cup has exacerbated.

“For me, personally, it’s not that [the Club World Cup] isn’t important,” he said. “We have played 63 games [this season]. … The European teams come to this competition differently than the Brazilian or South American teams, due to the amount of games we’ve played. The desire to win is the same … [but] the conditions are different.”

A journalist swiftly corrected him. Fluminense have actually played more games in the same period. So have Flamengo and others.

The true difference, which no European player would admit but everyone sensed, was that the South American teams and others simply cared more.

They rode waves of passionate support. They played — no, they fought — with unparalleled intensity. While Europeans whined about pitches and weather and travel and calendars, players from the Americas, Africa and Asia embraced this opportunity to compete with the world’s best, and with the world watching. They bellied up to Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund. They beat PSG and Chelsea. They forced the entire soccer ecosystem to ask: Has Europe’s superiority been exaggerated?

A couple weeks ago, the answer seemed to be yes.

But now, the Club World Cup is descending toward the conclusion everyone expected.

In Sunday’s final, Chelsea, the fourth-best team in England, will meet either Real Madrid, the second-best team in Spain; or Paris Saint-Germain, the champions of Europe.

We did not necessarily expect Chelsea, specifically, to make it this far. The Blues were doubted; not written off, but largely ignored. Only 22,137 fans attended their opener in Atlanta. A larger crowd saw them lose to Flamengo on Matchday 2. Nothing from the past 12 months suggested they might be the best team in the world.

Now, though, “the results, they speak for themselves,” winger Pedro Neto said.

And they prove a point better than Madrid or PSG or Bayern Munich could.

The point is that the European teams didn’t need to care like their careers depended on it. They didn’t need to be fresh. They didn’t need to be more than the sums of their parts. They didn’t need to match intensity levels to prove their superiority.

Maresca, undeterred by his foot-in-mouth moment at Monday’s news conference, went back to the same point after Tuesday’s semifinal, which was played in 94-degree heat: “It was very difficult conditions. … Fluminense had a one-month holiday six months ago in December-January, we had a month off 13 months ago. So there was a difference in energy.”

Nonetheless, his team cruised to a 2-0 victory.

It cruised because Chelsea and the other European superclubs have irreversible, often insurmountable financial advantages. Because they can pay the most lucrative salaries, they have all the best players from the other continents. Chelsea had João Pedro, who Fluminense produced, only to lose him to a middling English team (Watford) soon after his 18th birthday, largely because the English team could pay him more money.

So of course the three teams that will write the final chapters of this global tournament are from Europe. They and their peers resisted the Club World Cup, and have been eager to point out its flaws; but in the end, as Neto said, they came “here to compete.” And so, in the end, one of them will lift the trophy.

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