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.

For the rest of the world and anyone who truly wants to engage their brain and stop being self-centered, there is absolutely no doubt about the hierarchy. Olympic Champion > World Champion > Continental Champion (for example, European Champion). Except for football, due to FIFA’s rule that full national teams don’t participate in the Olympics. In all other sports, this hierarchy holds.

As for clubs, the NBA champion cannot be the world champion until they play that one game against the EuroLeague champion and other continental competition winners, even though we know what the outcome would be in 98% of cases. Just like in football, the winner of the Champions League doesn’t call themselves the world champion until they defeat the winner of the Copa Libertadores and other continental competitions. And in the history of the FIFA Club World Cup, the world champion always comes from one of these two competitions.

Gobert thrives?