It must be said that the 2024–25 European soccer season belonged to Paris Saint-Germain. After a shaky start, which saw them come within a whisker of failing to even make it out of the forgiving league stage of the new Champions League format, the Parisiens bought a new star, found themselves, and hit their stride. Behind a well-ordered but dizzyingly, dazzlingly fluid style of play, and supernova turns from the likes of Ousmane Dembélé and Vitinha, PSG ended the season blowing away all challengers, capped off by an iconic 5–0 demolition job against Inter in the UCL final. The sumptuous play, imposing results, and the youthfulness of the roster won the team the biggest title in the club game, will likely win Dembélé the Ballon d’Or, and marked this team as a potentially era-defining one.
And yet, at what I guess is the official close of that season, PSG is not the team standing in the spotlight today. Though the French club was the massive favorite to add the title of world champion to its extended list of accolades in Sunday’s Club World Cup final, it was actually Chelsea that wound up lifting the trophy by doing what PSG had made its calling card over the last seven months: going up against a great team and beating the hell out of them.
There was only one difference between the PSG lineup that crushed Inter back in May and the lineup that took the field against Chelsea on Sunday, though the absence proved crucial. Willian Pacho, PSG’s best center back, had to sit out the final after picking up a late red card in the quarterfinal against Bayern Munich. Starting the match in Bill Pacho’s (theme week, baby!) place was Lucas Beraldo, who is young and talented but nevertheless nowhere near as good as his Ecuadorian teammate. Chelsea wisely aimed its two sharpest knives, Cole Palmer and semifinal hero João Pedro, directly into that Pacho-sized weak spot, and the pair of forwards bled PSG dry.
Palmer, in certainly the biggest match of his young career, had arguably the game of his life. What would qualify as stunning in other circumstances—a 23-year-old in only his second season as a regular starter, whose only previous “big game” experience came a couple months earlier in the final of Europe’s tertiary continental tournament, going up against the best team on the planet and helping put three goals past them with little more than a smirk and a shrug—is, for anyone who knows anything about Cole Palmer, somehow the least surprising thing in the world. His lack of affect is mind-blowing. You can almost talk yourself into believing that he simply does not understand the stakes of the moment, such is his unreal calmness in even the most emotionally tumultuous scenarios, until you remember how consistently he shows up in those situations, at which point an even more terrifying truth dawns on you: He is fully aware of the size of the moment, he’s just always 100-percent certain that he is bigger than it.
All three of Chelsea’s goals were born from Palmer’s left foot, and all three were touched by his already legendary aloof brilliance. Despite the fact that he’d fired just wide from a similar position about 15 minutes earlier, when the ball fell to Palmer at the crown of the PSG penalty area in the 22nd minute, I was positive he’d convert—such is the almost unfailing consistency he’s established over the past couple years in his favorite zone of the pitch. Sure enough, Palmer calmly rolled the ball into the lower corner of keeper Gianluigi Donnarumma’s goal, giving Chelsea the lead.
Though a surprising turn of events in a match PSG had been expected to win handily, Chelsea’s opening goal had been coming. The Blues entered the match determined to quite literally jam the usually whirling gears of the PSG possession machine with tight, physical, man-to-man marking all over the field. This had the intended effect of preventing PSG from getting into its normal flow, which led to regular turnovers, which then triggered instantaneous, ruthless counter attacks, primarily orchestrated by Palmer and João Pedro and aimed at the gap between Nuno Mendes and Beraldo.
I have been and probably still remain highly skeptical of manager Enzo Maresca—who comes off like a bit of an asshole, and, seemingly out of a desperation to make his name as the next Pep Jr. strategical mastermind, has at times forced the team to play a rigid and slow style that works in direct opposition to his squad’s actual abilities—but he deserves credit for scrapping the tiki taka nonsense he often goes on and on about in favor of a defensively steely, offensively direct and unornamented gameplan that proved highly effective. It made sense, then, when Palmer doubled Chelsea’s lead just eight minutes later, scoring an almost identical shot from an almost identical position, this time after two subtle feints that completely hoodwinked Vitinha and Beraldo and allowed the Englishman to stroll into the penalty box unimpeded. Especially in that little twist of the hips that baffled Vitinha, the serenity, agility, and awareness on display perfectly instantiated what it is that makes Palmer so special.
Before the first half was out, Palmer again made PSG pay by exposing that very same center-right channel. Another counter saw Palmer carrying the ball at a back-peddling defense, but rather than shoot, this time Palmer flexed his elite final pass, fizzing the ball onto a João Pedro run in the box, with the Brazilian finishing with a cool chip shot over Donnarumma. A 3–0 halftime deficit is always daunting, and if a PSG comeback would’ve been difficult even in the most ideal of circumstances, the accumulated physical and mental fatigue of this criminally long season, and at the ass end of a grueling tournament that really doesn’t mean all that much anyway, probably made it even harder for PSG to muster the required energy in the second half. PSG did play better after the break—one that was extended by an annoying halftime show, yet another unwanted Americanized incursion—but not well enough to make a difference. And so Chelsea came away victorious, having earned the right to call itself the sport’s first truly world champion.
For someone with my specific preferences, Chelsea made for a close to ideal winner. This is due principally to the way a Chelsea win undermines the importance of the tournament itself. While most of Europe regarded the Club World Cup with a healthy amount of mistrust and distaste, no (serious) competing country held the CWC in lower esteem than the UK. The notoriously provincial Brits have never struggled to come up with reasons to discount competitions that might threaten the sanctity of their own leagues and their self-image as the true doyens of the sport. After all, what is the mythic cold rainy night in Stoke if not a(n unconvincing) rhetorical tactic meant to deflate the significance of anything that happens outside the British Isles? That general provincialism, coupled with the fact that the only two English representatives in the competition are widely considered plastic clubs back home, meant the Brits were never going to bring the sort of passion or even interest that might imbue the tournament with a deeper meaning. Along the same lines, it will be funny next season to see Chelsea fans (rightfully!) trumpeting their impressive performance in the final and their new world title, while every other fan base (rightfully!) roasts them for trumping up a preseason trinket.
Likewise, a PSG victory might’ve bestowed upon the CWC a credibility that I’d prefer it didn’t have. Soccer may be a game about winning and losing, but the effect isn’t unidirectional. Sometimes it’s the case that winning a game or a title or an award confers greatness upon a player or team, while other times it’s the player or team that confers greatness upon the competition. The new CWC had no inherent greatness to go about conferring to anyone, and so it was always beholden to the established, tradition-rich clubs and players to provide the proceedings with any importance—hence the incredible financial rewards FIFA offered in order to get the participants to come and take things seriously. PSG entered the tournament having already told a legendary story this season, armed with the potential to extend the narrative through the summer and beyond, as it attempts to become the kind of dynastic force that marks an era. Another big win in Sunday’s final would’ve put the CWC right alongside the Champions League trophy and Dembélé’s would’ve-been-certain Ballon d’Or and whatever else comes next for this group. But now, with a PSG loss, the CWC loses out on all that reflected glory.
Of course, the meanings of this inaugural Club World Cup are multiple, and are subject to change alongside the course of the future. Maybe Palmer goes on to become the standout player of his generation, and this tournament goes down as the first miracle in a series of them. Maybe Maresca fully gives up on his Pep Jr. delusions, embraces chaosball, and builds a perennial Premier League and Champions League contender, pointing back to this CWC as the spark that lit the blaze. Maybe in four years a truly iconic team does go ahead and win the CWC, and the same thing happens four years later, and eventually the tournament does in fact become the most prestigious cup in the sport, and Chelsea’s win retroactively takes on a veneration that it doesn’t have today. Maybe next season is plagued by ruinous injuries due to over-exertion, the players collectively put their foot down and demand a change to the calendar, and the CWC under this format is a one-off. No one knows what the future may hold. What I do feel comfortable saying right now, though, is that Cole Palmer is really fucking good, and I enjoyed watching him win this trophy, especially since his winning of it made it a little less shiny.
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