Who Is Winning At Soccer?

If a typically tight, unexciting late-stage tournament match can be redeemed with a great goal, João Pedro was the savior that Tuesday's Club World Cup semifinal between Chelsea and Fluminense needed. Twice the Brazilian injected into the game the kind of inspiration and pinpoint precision that was otherwise in short supply. His first goal was a long-range beauty, an almost golf-like shot where João Pedro patiently settled the ball, lined up his target, scoped out the hazards in between him and it, measured his approach, and ripped a drive into the far-side netting. His second goal was even better, a strike of such force and purity and exactitude of footwork that I'm compelled to include the following video, which appropriately focuses on nothing but the shooting technique itself:

João Pedro's 18th- and 56th-minute goals, Chelsea comfort in managing the game around them, and Fluminense's inability to match the Chelsea forward's accuracy at the key moments are what made the difference in the 2-0 victory, which sent the Blues to the CWC final, where they will face Paris Saint-Germain on Sunday. As the last-standing member of the South American contingent that had done so much to elevate this tournament above its ignoble origins, Fluminense's honorable exit brought a bittersweet close to what had been the most heartening storyline of the competition. But if we were never likely to get the South American champion that would've been the only truly special ending this newfangled tournament could've provided, it's at least fitting that Fluminense's defeat was such a neat microcosm of the state of the sport.

Almost as striking as the images of João Pedro's right foot making its two violently perfect impacts with the ball were the images of João Pedro's anti-celebrations in response. The reasons for his apologetic reactions to his pair of worldies go way back. The 23-year-old Brazilian, who less than a week before had seen the rights to his playing services purchased by Chelsea from Brighton and Hove Albion for a tidy £55 million, got his start in soccer at the club he'd just scored against. Back in 2011, a Fluminense scout noticed the nine-year-old João Pedro in a youth match and offered him a spot in the academy, which set him on a life-changing journey that took him from his native Sao Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, then to Watford, then to Brighton and Hove, and now to London. After the game, João Pedro explained what Flu means to him and why he couldn't celebrate its defeat: "[Fluminense] gave me everything. They showed me to the world. If I'm here, it's because they believed in me. I'm very grateful but this is football—I have to be professional. I feel sorry for them, but I have to do my job."

The line about being a professional doing a job he is handsomely paid to do was the recurring motif of João Pedro's postgame comments. Indeed, it is the mercantile nature of big-time soccer that had brought every last team, player, and fan to New Jersey on Tuesday afternoon. No matter what the Eurocentrists, with their vaunted talk about pride and prestige, might have you believe, it's first and foremost the forces of commerce that ship scores of young Brazilians like João Pedro from clubs like Fluminense to clubs like Chelsea every year. Fellow South American Blues Enzo Fernández and Moisés Caicedo, who were also standout performers on Tuesday, arrived via similar paths, as did Andrey Santos, who came on for Fernández in the game's final minutes. Palmeiras starlet Estêvão, whose team Chelsea knocked out the round before, will be joining his continental peers in London later this month, since his long-awaited move to Chelsea can at last go through now that he's of legal exporting age. On the other end of the career spectrum, Fluminense captain Thiago Silva made the reverse trip just a year ago, leaving Chelsea to return to the Brazilian club that had nurtured his talent during a key stretch in his early 20s. (Only one of Chelsea's starters, Trevoh Chalobah, came from their own academy. That's no coincidence, seeing as Chelsea treats its academy—one of the most productive in the world in recent years—as little more than a profit farm to fund the big-ticket signings the club is known for.) The millions and millions of dollars that the big European teams have earned by committing to the CWC boondoggle will help bring still more Fluminense and Palmeiras and River Plate and Boca Juniors players over the pond in coming years.

The effect of Europe's hoggish devouring of the global talent market has led to a world of clear, undeniable superiority of the European teams and leagues—or at least, that's what we are to believe. Love it or hate it, but, according to this way of thinking, there's no real argument that the big leagues have all the best players, all the best coaches, the most advanced tactics, and therefore handily the best teams. This was the idea the Club World Cup would presumably confirm, but which has in fact been challenged by unexpected results like Flamengo flattening Chelsea and Botafogo beating PSG in the group stage, Al-Hilal knocking out Manchester City in the round of 16, and Fluminense getting to the semis. The self-serving justifications for those upsets—the stifling heat of the American summer (which everyone has had to deal with), the shoddiness of the CWC pitches (which everyone has had to deal with), the competition being held at the end of the lengthy and intense European league season (long, overstuffed seasons are hardly limited to Europe, and curiously the schedule was never a talking point when the shoe was on the other foot during the old, winter CWC format), and the lack of motivation for this meaningless trophy (also the same for everybody)—are made in effort to protect that paradigm of European supremacy.

There is more than a little truth to the idea that the highest-quality club soccer is played in Europe. The financial gap between the big South American teams and their European counterparts is legitimately chasmic, so much so that even third-rate clubs like Watford have no trouble plucking gems out of the jewel boxes of comparatively bigger South American clubs like Fluminense. (To be fair, Fluminense is no Flamengo, but even Flamengo can't offer too much more resistance when the raiders descend.) In addition, worldwide scouting is incredibly robust, and the market for skilled players is rabidly competitive, so the European giants are spotting and snatching away talented kids from around the globe at higher rates and earlier ages than ever. Because soccer is a game of players, if you amass the most great players, you will also assemble the greatest teams almost by definition.

Still, I do think there's something revealing about how well the non-Europeans did at this CWC that goes beyond mere feel-good fluke or quirk of scheduling. Europe has long based the case for its soccer superiority on both its financial might and its methodological sophistication. True, the Europeans will concede that South American or African players maybe have that special something that grants them the potential for greatness—attributes that are often racialized, emphasizing purportedly inborn physical and instinctual traits over intellectual qualities and cultural causes—but it's not until those raw skills are tamed, honed, and verified by European coaches in European competitions that the players can be considered fully realized. This is part of the motivation behind the increasingly young ages at which European clubs acquire promising South Americans—just to give a few examples of players currently playing for CWC teams, João Pedro, Estêvão, Vinícius, Rodrygo, and Endrick were all first signed when they were still minors—and their skepticism of excellent South American players who still find themselves on their home continent into their 20s. (Has the covetous European eye finally caught onto the fact that Jhon Arias and Richard Ríos are really good?) What the Europeans most trust is South American blood under European tutelage, the earlier the better.

This view of the European refinement of South American raw materials gets the causality backwards. It's the players themselves, developed in environments that produce superior, and above all different, technical qualities and perceptual capabilities who deserve the bulk of the credit for making European soccer what it is. The methodological, tactical stuff is secondary at best. It's no accident that only the most dyed-in-the-wool homers think very highly of Chelsea's manager and especially its leadership's cluelessly chaotic team-building practices, and yet the likes of João Pedro, Fernández, and Caicedo have helped drag them to the final.

But the notion of European supremacy and its innovative methods is an easy one to buy, even in South America. In fact, since the sport's earliest days, the decisive dialectic of South American soccer has been the dance between confidence in its own difference and the insecure pursuit of "advanced" European methodologies. In Brazil especially, ever since the disaster against Germany back in 2014, the prevailing soccer discourse has been about how the country let itself fall so far behind the less-talented but better-regimented Europeans, and what it can do to mimic their competitors in order to catch back up. I believe you can see the effect of this in the level of the current generation of Brazilian players being not only at its lowest point maybe ever, but also in the way that even the good players are so much less quintessentially Brazilian. It's legitimately shocking how singular Neymar is, not only in terms of the magnitude of his talent but also in his limitless creativity and spirit, in a country that used to grow Neymars like it grows palm trees.

It's a sad state of affairs in the country that more than any other defined the kind of player that makes the sport so magical, but the phenomenon's ramifications are surprising. If the hallmark of the European methodology is one of systemization and professionalization based on purportedly objective criteria, and if this methodology sands off the distinctiveness that makes the biggest talents so effective, I think it would also be fair to say that these methods provide a framework in which less talented players and teams can perform better than they might otherwise. The global transmission of these methods means that the ostensibly lesser countries, leagues, teams, and players are better able to compete with the big boys from the old continent in a competition like the Club World Cup, especially when they have certain advantages, like playing in heat that discourages the high-volume, all-action playing style prevalent in the European elite, and having the tournament come in the middle of your season and the end of theirs. In addition, the relative inferiority of the sanded-down South American talents, the ones who used to make the biggest difference, means the European giants aren't quite as good as they once were, back when they were led by your Di Stéfanos and Maradonas and Ronaldos and Ronaldinhos and Messis. In a strange way, the globalization and Europeanization of soccer has made everybody both better and worse.

I don't think any of this is straightforward enough to be designated strictly good or bad, nor do I think the current situation is final, irreversible state. To paraphrase a cliche, soccer finds a way. Neither South American nor European soccer would be the same if not for the productive friction between the two. Brazilians are still Brazilians, still crazy about soccer, still play and think about the game differently than others, and still produce great players capable of great things, like João Pedro kicking the cover off of the ball twice. (For anyone looking for reasons to hope for change, I think the recent triumphs of the Argentina national team, and the conversations about what Argentine soccer is, isn't, and could be that those triumphs have sparked, are encouraging.)

I do however think it speaks to something that a Fluminense academy product, signed just days before for an enormous fee, provided the two touches of class that were all that separated the most free-spending sporting project in Europe from the hallowed but underfunded, and not even particularly good, Brazilian club from whence the goalscorer first emerged. His boyhood club means so much to this player that he couldn't even bring himself to celebrate scoring the two highest-profile goals of his whole life. To João Pedro, one club represents love, passion, gratitude, and faith, while the other represents a job. There's something to the fact that he currently plays for one of them and not the other.