How to stop the Paris Saint-Germain juggernaut? As the Uefa Champions League holders blitz California, their base for a Fifa Club World Cup campaign that began with a 4-0 thumping of Atletico Madrid, that may need something special.
Step forward then, a footballer with an unusual backstory, a striker whose talent was honed, above all, in Dubai.
He is Igor Jesus Maciel da Cruz, who less than a year ago was waving an emotional farewell to Shabab Al Ahli, where over the best part of four years he had developed into a top-class centre-forward, a finisher whose goals had helped to earn a UAE Pro League title, among other prizes.
Brazilian by birth, Igor Jesus had settled so well into Emirati life there were tentative plans to, via naturalisation, guide him towards a future in the UAE national team.
But in a whirlwind past 12 months, the 24-year-old has been selected to lead the attack for Brazil, spearheaded his new club Botafogo’s greatest ever season, and put himself on course for a lucrative move to the English Premier League.
Upwardly-mobile Nottingham Forest is the likely destination, but Jesus has postponed the final stages of that transfer to drive Botafogo as far as he can at the Club World Cup, where they meet PSG in Pasadena on Friday.
He’s made one decisive contribution already, the headed goal that ensured Botafogo would secure three points from their opening fixture against Seattle Sounders.
It was the second of a 2-1 win and came from a well-timed Jesus leap, a neat step away from his marker and a firm connection with a right-wing cross.
It’s the kind of goal he specialises in – his expert aerial game would be familiar to those who watched him in his prolific UAE period. He scored almost a quarter of his 43 goals – struck at a rate of almost one every two matches – for Shabab Al Ahli with headers.
“I’m a penalty-box striker,” he explained to Brazilian reporters still catching up with who he was and what his strengths were, when, last October, he was suddenly a national figure, asked to play target man for crosses from Vinicius Junior or Raphinha for Brazil’s Selecao.
“I’m good in the air and from close to goal.” Sure enough, he marked his international debut with a headed goal, launching a Brazil comeback from 1-0 down to beat Chile in a World Cup qualifier.
The following month, he was making history for Botafogo with victory in the Copa Libertadores, the club’s first triumph in South American football’s most prestigious competition and the continental title that earned a ticket to the Club World Cup.
Jesus had propelled them through the Libertadores knockout phases, with three goals and two assists in five appearances up to the final, where Botafogo defeated compatriots Atletico Mineiro, despite having midfielder Gregore sent off within two minutes of kick-off.
“He’s a great striker to have in your side, and has really come on in the last year or so,” said Allan, the veteran midfielder who was playing for Al Wahda when Jesus was in the UAE Pro League and, last July, made a similar journey to Botafogo.
“When I played against him, he always seemed to score, so it’s been good to have him in the same team.”
That team has the responsibility of representing the best of South America against the best of Europe, a duel that, more often than not, would be the make-up of Club World Cup finals in the era when the competition was a slimmed-down tournament, featuring only the reigning champions of each continent.
In the new, supersized version of the Fifa event, the clash of Libertadores holders and Uefa Champions League winners has come early, and it’s a collision that speaks to the shifting power bases in the sport.
Like Botafogo, Paris Saint-Germain are champions of their continent for the first time, and, like Botafogo, they have been galvanised by a corporate takeover from abroad.
In the French club’s case it is from Qatar; in the Brazilians’ case, from the USA. Thus the two dominant streams – Gulf finance and US investment – in the 21st century reshaping of elite club football.
And as it happens, these are two owners who regularly spark off one another. Botafogo became part of the Eagle Football group in 2022, coming under the same multi-club umbrella body that has stakes in Crystal Palace in London, RWD Molenbeek in Belgium and Olympique Lyonnais in France.
At Lyon, the dominant force in domestic French football in the decade that preceded the transformational 2011 Qatari takeover at PSG, the rivalry with PSG has taken on a new edge in the three years of John Textor, the Eagle Football founder, as president.
The association of Botafogo with his leadership will not be lost on the PSG executives in LA. Last year, during a heated meeting of French club presidents who had gathered to discuss a growing crisis around the sale of television rights to France’s Ligue 1, Textor called PSG’s president Nasser Al Khelaifi a “bully”.
The PSG boss retorted to Textor that he was a “cowboy”. Recordings of the meeting were leaked to the media and at the Lyon-PSG match later in the season, Textor made a point of wearing a large stetson hat, cowboy-style.
Relations are said to have warmed between the two since, but Textor and his allies will have recognised with some concern the same swagger in PSG so far at the Club World Cup that, season after season, they show in lording it over Lyon and the rest of Ligue 1.
And the same panache they put on display in thrashing Inter Milan 5-0 in Munich to lift their maiden European Cup. The Doha-inspired PSG project has seldom looked more powerful.
