Barcelona had a fantastic 2024-25 season, although it would've been even better if they won the Champions League (they were the favourite).
Real suffered a bit of humiliation, especially considering they lost all direct games against Barcelona (El Clásico), but they still have a chance to salvage their reputation and make their fans happy by either winning the FIFA Club World Cup or, at the very least, achieving semi-finals or the final.
The prestige and the prize pool of FIFA CWC is similar to those of the Champions League. I believe the total prize pot is around $1 billion, so not something to be ignored.
How was Barcelona the favourite for the Champions League last season. There can never be only one favourite for it. If you had said, Barcelona were one of the favourites then it's very valid. Liverpool was seen as one of the favourites but exited earlier in the competition. PSG was one of the favourites as well, same as Bayern Munich too. All I'm saying is that, there cannot be only one favourite, there's always two or more favourites to win a competition.
That is right. You can’t just wake up and feel like Barcelona is the favourite just because they won almost all the El Clasico matches last season. All I will say is that this guy is just a Barcelona fan, because we all saw what happened in the Champions League last season. We had around 3–4 teams that were favorite to win the title, but at the end of the day, the team that simply believed in themselves, PSG won the title.
At first, we didn’t think that PSG would make it out of Liverpool’s hands in the quarter-final, but after they did, that’s when many people started having hope in them. Even though I know they were expecting to see a final between Barcelona and PSG, Inter Milan changed everything and ended up losing the final, without even scoring a single goal.
We can criticize Barcelona in the two matches they played against Inter. Because they gave too many positions behind and gave Inter a chance to score easily. Barcelona was the superior side throughout the match in both matches, but Inter scored very good counterattacks and tied the match. Especially in the match in Italy, after the goal they scored with Acerbi in the last second, they played much more dominant and better in the extra time with the support of the crowd and scored the winning goal. Barcelona, who played very well in the Spanish league, lost their chance to go to the finals. If they had gone to the finals, they could have won against Paris Saint-Germain and won the cup because Barcelona is a team for big matches. However, when they had a small problem against Inter, they lost their chance to go to the finals.