I understand this topic has been done to death, but it seems completely asinine that this discussion has been reduced to pure semantics since the US’ triumph.
It comes across as completely obtuse to say there is any material difference between the FIBA World Cup and Olympics outside of the name. I mean, if you really want to get into the weeds of it the World Cup is a QUALIFIER for the Olympics so clearly it shouldn’t be held in such high regard. It just seems some are going out of their way to completely ignore the obvious hierarchy of basketball internationally in order to keep their pride intact.
Your problem is you are arguing mostly against people that don’t give a shit about football/soccer.
Yeah, I know. It’s a Sisyphean task. I only used football as an example, but this applies to all team sports. It’s not the rest of the world’s fault that USA doesn’t have a professional volleyball league, for instance, so they send players to compete in Europe. Federations usually just semantically add “World Champion” or “World Club Champion” to the titles, but this distinction often gets lost quickly because it’s assumed that the viewer is intelligent enough to distinguish between a club and a national team.