The triumph of positive soccer

This year's Confederations Cup (CC) tournament was quite interesting. The CC gathers the world soccer's six continental champions, the World Cup holder plus the host nation. This year's participants were Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Argentina, Greece, Australia, Tunisia and Japan.

While the CC has been long derided as a pointless tournament, this year's edition featured some brilliant soccer. World Cup winners Brazil thrashed their bitter rival, South American champions Argentina, by 4-1 in the final; all five goals were highlight reel stuff. How can stuff this good be considered pointless?

Still, the CC is essentially redundant. The CC is the championship of champions. Yet the World Cup is the tournament designed to determine the best team in the world. Nevertheless the CC concept is interesting because you have to be the champion of something in order to win. It's a bit like the way the European Champions Cup/League used to be. It gets a bit tiresome every four years to hear the 17th best team in Europe whine about not getting a World Cup bid; if you're not even in the top 16 in your continent, how can you possibly have pretensions to being #1 in the world?

The CC was created as part of the power struggle between the world soccer federation FIFA and the European confederation UEFA. FIFA created the CC to get more money. UEFA ballooned its club Champions [sic] League and added a million qualifying rounds to get more money. UEFA even created something called an Intertoto Cup to get more money. FIFA created a World Club Championship to get more money, even though the idea actually makes sense, from a sporting perspective, unlike the ones I just mentioned. Some huge clubs are even threatening to secede from UEFA... to get more money.

But one positive from the CC: the triumph of attacking soccer. There were fears that Greece's triumph at Euro 2004 signaled a return to the dark ages. There were fears that this heralded a return to prominence of dreadful, loathsome negative, insomnia-inducing anti-soccer that blighted the game in the early 90s. The success of the brilliant Brazilians and the attacking Argentines was a breath of fresh air. Greece crashed out in the first round without scoring a goal. That even the host Germans, world masters of boring soccer, were somewhat exciting to watch was perhaps the most optimistic sign.

So if the only thing to come out of the CC was vindication for the kind of soccer that most people actually want to watch, then it seems worth it to me.