If spectators at Miami’s Hard Rock stadium are in luck, the best Club World Cup final of recent memory will be reimagined on Wednesday night, Florida time.
If precedent is a sound guide, the new-look competition should prepare for plenty of goals – the last time Real Madrid and Al Hilal met they shared eight of them over 90 minutes, Europe’s finest pipping Asia’s grand dukes for the trophy.
That Club World Cup, in early 2023, was still being organised in its slimmed-down form, but turned out to be seminal in many respects. It was staged in Morocco, to where the joint hosting rights for a World Cup – the 2030 edition – would be awarded by Fifa a few months later.
That Al Hilal team was about to be transformed by a huge financial injection that would raise the club’s global profile. And Real Madrid … well, they did as Madrid tend to do in these major events.
They found a way of winning while offering the opposition a sniff of an upset. The final score in Rabat was 5-3 but for over half an hour Al Hilal were within a goal of parity.
Vinicius Junior and Fede Valverde scored twice each for a Madrid whose line-up, two and half years on, will likely include that pair and several other longer servants of the club, although there is no mistaking the significant rebuild ahead at football’s most glamorous institution.
At the Hard Rock, under what is forecast to be a fierce summer heat, Trent Alexander-Arnold, signed from Liverpool, anticipates a debut while Luka Modric will be embarking on his farewell competition at a club where he has collected six Club World Cup or Intercontinental Cup titles and half a dozen European Cups among his 28 trophies with Madrid.
Above all, there’s a new manager, Xabi Alonso, making his bow, his employers boasting that they have captured the best manager still in his 40s. Al Hilal might contest that.
Their new coach, also making his touchline premiere, is 49-year-old Simone Inzaghi, whose time at Inter Milan came to an end earlier this month just after he had guided the Italians to a second Uefa Champions League final in the space of three years.
Inzaghi spoke of his “affection for Saudi Arabian football,” at his presentation, citing his trips to the kingdom as Inter coach, notably for a series of Italian Super Cups staged in Riyadh, but he does not have the background of familiarity that Alonso, an ex Madrid player, enjoys.
So Inzaghi reached out to touchstones from his European experience. The Italian says he will relish working with the dynamic Al Hilal midfielder Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, an ally when Inzaghi coached Lazio while also surveying a squad that, even after a disappointing season – Al Hilal were dethroned as Saudi champions by Al Ittihad in May – has a comforting worldliness.
That starts at the back, with a goalkeeper greatly coveted, two years ago, by Madrid. Real’s strategists based their high estimation of Yassine Bounou, or ‘Bono’ as he is universally known, on his brilliant body of work over five seasons with Sevilla.
His heroics were responsible for two Europa League victories, and his masterly shot-stopping for Morocco was also influential in their historic march to the semi-finals of the 2022 World Cup.
But in the summer of 2023, Bono said ‘no’ to joining Europe’s most decorated club, choosing instead the bold ambition of Saudi Arabian football.
He promptly won a domestic treble of league, King’s Cup and Super Cup, and added extended runs in the Asian Champions League to a rare CV of global experience, one that stretches from an African Champions League final, when he was 20, with Casablanca’s Wydad, or WAC, and on to those Europa League odysseys with Sevilla.
At this, the inaugural supersized Fifa Club World Cup, Bono gets to trace many of the contours of his long professional journey.
He was born in North America, where 34 years ago, his father, a professor of science, was working in academia in Montreal, returning not long into Yassine’s childhood to Morocco.
As an aspiring footballer, he grew up with WAC, who are among the four African contenders at the Club World Cup, but was courted from there by Atletico Madrid – Spain’s other representatives in the tournament – his first stop on a voyage through La Liga that ended up with his fruitful Sevilla spell.
There are compatriots in Bono’s immediate sightlines, too. Al Hilal’s second group game is against Pachuca, of Mexico, where Morocco international winger Oussama Idrissi has made an intrepid, impressive mark over the last two seasons.
In Miami, the goalkeeper confronts a formidable Madrid strike-force that may at some stage include Bono’s celebrated teammate with the Atlas Lions, Brahim Diaz.
The coming weeks are significant for Brahim. Xabi Alonso’s appreciation of what the player offers, across a variety of attacking positions, is unknown.
A proposed extension of Brahim’s Madrid contract, which currently expires in 2027, has been outlined to the player within the short time Alonso, who left Bayer Leverkusen last month, has been in charge.
What will be clearer in the course of the Club World Cup is whether Brahim can expect more playing time under the new coach than he saw under Carlo Ancelotti, whom Alonso has replaced.
Ancelotti always made it plain he valued Brahim highly and he frequently recognised that the player's regular impact, from the bench and starting a little less than 50 per cent of matches, was always a key part of his plan.
But Brahim wants to be in Madrid’s initial line-up for more than one game in every two. Alonso knows that.
In Miami, we’ll start to learn about how the coach intends to resolve that issue, among others, and to maximise the combined potency of Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius, Rodrygo, Brahim, Arda Guler, Endrick and Alexander-Arnold.
