Porto’s group stage exit from Club World Cup showcases complicated journey for European teams

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EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — On a balmy Monday evening in the New York City area, reality was basically suspended. Porto and Al Ahly combined for 50 attempts at goal in their Group A finale at the Club World Cup, somehow delivering eight goals in a 4-4 match from just 4.76 expected goals, but shots were not the only thing those sides traded over the course of 90 minutes. The sublime went hand-in-hand with the ridiculous at MetLife Stadium, complete with Wessam Abou Ali’s perfect hattrick for Al Ahly and Claudio Ramos‘ lackadaisical performance in Porto’s goal. The difficult was easy that night, as each team’s stockpile of worldies will demonstrate, while the simple stuff was hard to pull off, as Al Ahly’s inability to score in front of a wide-open net would demonstrate.

In essence, it was the most entertaining dead rubber match one could have possibly asked for.

It was not technically a dead rubber — both Porto and Al Ahly had a shot of advancing to the next round, though they each needed to win by multiple goals themselves and hope that the right team won in the Miami suburbs, where Inter Miami drew 2-2 with Palmeiras. None of those unlikely scenarios ended up playing out, the irony of Monday’s goal-fest being that these two sides were doomed because they could not finish their opportunities in their first two group stage matches. The entertainment could not cancel out the fact that Porto and Al Ahly crashed out of the Club World Cup group stage, though one exit was more surprising than the other.

Egypt’s Al Ahly, who used the Club World Cup to sign new players like national team regular Zizo and Tunisia’s Mohamed Ali Ben Romdhane as well as a new manager in Spain’s Jose Riviero, were still the least likely to advance out of Group A even after their shopping spree. Their chances came in at 41.1% before the first game, per Opta, their last place finish indicative of just that. Porto, the two-time UEFA Champions League winners, entered the Club World Cup as the favorites to advance with a 60.5% chance of doing so, and instead became the first European team to clinch a group stage elimination despite not facing another foe from their continent. It is the type of exit that left Porto manager Martin Anselmi virtually speechless post-match, falling short of the redemption arc they hoped to craft on Monday.

“We are not happy, obviously,” Anselmi said, “We constantly tried to win the match.”

The effort Anselmi mentioned was certainly on display, though it comes with obvious caveats. They came back from behind four times on Monday, never boasting the lead despite being the oddsmakers’ favorite to win the game, letting Al Ahly dictate the tempo for much of the night and settling for second-best. There are some reasonable explanations for Porto’s disappointing run at the Club World Cup — Porto were coming off a long European season, dealing with the start of a heat wave in the northeast of the U.S. that meant it was nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit at kickoff, the air humid and heavy. Anselmi is also just five months into the job, his first in Europe.

“The thing is that you don’t do your analysis on one single day,” he said. “We never had an opportunity to come to a stop and have an opportunity to work on the changes … Listing them here is not the right time but the time is coming to implement those changes.”

Al Ahly, though, dealt with all of the same issues. They obviously had to play in the same conditions, but their season runs concurrently with those in Europe and Riviero has had even less time with his squad after being hired last month. Porto, very simply, squandered an opportunity to prove an oversimplified hypothesis true — that European teams could easily dominate against the rest of the world, especially against teams outside of South America.

The basic theory has some merit, chiefly in the historic and financial advantages European clubs have over everybody else. Porto’s squad is worth an estimated $400 million, ranking 11th for all teams at the Club World Cup and ahead of every single team outside of Europe. How well that squad was constructed, though, is another question entirely. Their Club World Cup exit marks the end of a middling season for the team, finishing third place in Portugal‘s Primeira Liga, well behind Sporting Lisbon and Benfica in first and second place, respectively. The UEFA Europa League did not offer much of a reprieve, exiting in the knockout phase playoffs after a 4-3 aggregate loss to Roma. Even if it is easy to envision Europe as a monolithic soccer powerhouse that will rise to the top time and time again, this iteration of Porto does not fit that mold at all.

Porto’s inability to advance is the primary — but not the only — example that the margins are closer than some may have realized in the global club game, regardless of one team’s inherent advantages. They weren’t even the only European club eliminated Monday, with Atletico Madrid bowing out as well. Or take Borussia Dortmund as another example, they were second-best in their 0-0 draw with Fluminense and vulnerable in a 4-3 win over South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns, or even Real Madrid, who surprised with a 1-1 draw against Al-Hilal, and Inter, who scraped by in a 1-1 draw with Monterrey and a 2-1 win over Urawa Red Diamonds. Each of these teams are coming off European seasons that left something to be desired, and some are perhaps treating this as a postseason tour or a head start on preseason training. The lesson from these matches is pretty clear, though — being clinical is the easiest way to win matches, be it in a late stage Champions League match or your Club World Cup opener against a team you have no experience playing against.

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