A farce. That was German great Franz Beckenbauer’s opinion of last Sunday’s Toyota Cup. A farce? Is that any way to describe the game, played each year in Japan between the champion clubs of Europe and South America, to decide which is the world champion?

Beckenbauer’s harsh description was given even before the game between Portugal’s F.C. Porto and Colombia’s Once Caldas had been played. Two far from glamorous clubs, surprise winners both – but that was not the point of Beckenbauer’s criticism. Nor were his words a continuation of long-standing European opposition to the game, which is seen as an unnecessary addition to an already overcrowded schedule.

Beckenbauer was drawing attention to the unpalatable fact that when small clubs achieve success, they are promptly stripped of their best players by rich clubs. As he saw it, the Porto team then on its way to Japan had “nothing to do with” the team that won the UEFA Champions League last May.

After that win, Porto lost its coach, Jose Mourinho, and its two star defenders, Ricardo Carvalho and Paulo Ferreira, to the English club Chelsea, while playmaker Deco joined Barcelona. Once Caldas lost its two chief goal scorers: Sergio Galvan Rey joined the MetroStars, and Arnulfo Valentierra left to play in the United Arab Emirates. Another striker, Jorge Agudelo, was fired after testing positive for cocaine.

Two weakened teams was bad enough, but there was worse news to come. That had to do with the type of soccer played by Once Caldas.

Two words will do to describe it: defensive and boring. The same sort of game that Greece employed to win the European championship this summer. Under German coach Otto Rehhagel, the Greeks managed to score only seven goals in their six games, but their steely defensive discipline saw them through, as opponents scored only four times.

While the appallingly unadventurous style of the team was heavily criticized, there was plenty of praise for Rehhagel’s ability to win with a group of unheralded players. Chelsea’s Mourinho commented: “Rehhagel did wonderful work; he had no stars, no players coming from the moon.”

There you have it, the Rehhagel formula for success: iron discipline, defensive tactics, modest players, no stars. It might equally well be called the Montoya formula, for Once Caldas coach Luis Fernando Montoya.

On July 1 – three days before the Greeks lifted their trophy – a similar celebration had taken place thousands of miles away in the Colombian city of Manizales, 7,000 feet up in the Andes.

Once Caldas, the local team, had won the Copa Libertadores and were now officially the top club team in South America. In many ways this was an even more remarkable achievement than that of Greece. Few people outside of Colombia had ever heard of Once Caldas, or even knew where Manizales was.

Coach Montoya had built his team’s success on defense, exactly as Rehhagel did with Greece. In the Libertadores tournament, Once Caldas scored a mere 17 goals in 14 games, but gave up only 10.And,of course, there was not a star to be seen. Said Montoya: “This is the triumph of a humble, disciplined, hardworking team.”

For Once Caldas, the Libertadores victory did not represent the end of the road. Still to come was the Toyota Cup and the possibility of being crowned world club champion.

The big day arrived on Sunday, and Once Caldas duly played its boring, defensive game. It managed only one shot on goal during the first half, and things were not much better in the second.

Porto managed to do plenty of attacking and was desperately unlucky not to score four or five goals. Two “goals” from South African forward Benni McCarthy were disallowed by mistaken offside calls, and McCarthy also hit the goal posts no less than three times!

The charmed life led by Once Caldas throughout the 90-minute game continued during the 30-minute overtime period. So after two hours of survival for Once Caldas, two hours of frustration for Porto, and two hours of tedium for the polite Japanese fans, the title was now to be decided in a penalty kick shootout.

The situation favored Once Caldas, which had won the Libertadores with a shootout win over Boca Juniors, and whose goalkeeper, Juan Carlos Henao, was considered outstanding at saving penalty kicks. There was also the fact that, during the overtime period, Porto had lost its starting goalkeeper, Victor Baia, to injury and would have to rely on substitute Nuno to do the shot stopping.

Nuno seemed totally bewildered by the shootout, barely moving as the Once Caldas players rifled shots past him. He made no saves, but surprisingly, neither did the agile Henao. For once we had a shootout in which the goalkeepers were superfluous. It came down to missed kicks. Porto’s Maniche hit the bar, then Once Caldas’s Jonathan Fabbro hit the post. The fatal miss came on the 17th kick, as Edwin Garcia of Once Caldas skied his shot over the bar.

So this utterly forgettable game ended with Porto deservedly taking the title of world champions. But even that accomplishment is not quite what it seems, for the Toyota Cup has never been acknowledged by FIFA as an official tournament. Porto will be the last of the unofficial world champions, a breed that dates all the way back to 1960 and the old Intercontinental Cup competition.

There will be no more Toyota Cups. FIFA has stepped in, and next year a new and official annual tournament will be staged in Japan. Not consisting of just a single game, the FIFA club world championship will be a week-long tournament featuring the champions from each of the six geographic areas into which FIFA divides the world: Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, North & Central America, and Oceania.

A more inclusive arrangement certainly, but one that has exacerbated the already strong European dislike of the event, because it means that their representative will now have to play two games instead of one.

FIFA has announced a prize-money pot of $15 million to be shared among the six teams. Possibly that will quell the European opposition. At the financial level, at least, such a tournament could hardly be called a farce.