Or Is So Paulo looking to justify their exit from the tournament.

For lack of a better term, I compared this tournament to the UEFA Cup to my European friends.
But the difference was that the Manchesters, Real Madrids, Liverpools, Milans, and Juventus of the world would never:
A) Be in it now due to their dominance in their respective leagues.

B) Get automatically invited to it.

So Paulo president Juvenal Juvencio stated that they club is looking for a way to back out of their commitment to the tournament next year. He mentioned that participating in this tournament generated more losses than earnings.

So Paulo, alongside Boca Juniors, are the only two clubs in all of South America that earn a profit on a consistent basis. The Argentine side gets an automatic bid into the tournament and gets a bye out of the early stages, while the Paulistas have to come out of the Brazilian group.

Our only reason to play a tournament like this is to avenge our loss to Boca Juniors (from the Recopa), said Juvencio, other than that it is not worth out time to play in. To the So Paulo brass their matchup against Boca was their final and to eliminate them was their objective. So when they faced Colombian side Millonarios, the tournament was now anticlimactic. The final result could not have made it more obvious? Or am I being convinced too easily?

What I do believe, as compared to the Argentine sides, is that in this semester of the South American football calendar most teams will prefer a local title to this international tournament. Most of the past winners were in dire need of an intenational trophy or any trophy for that matter.

San Lorenzo and Cienciano earned their first international trophies ever. Boca won their first of two titles, helped extinguish the post-Bianchi fires (that is until Saliva-gate emerged). River is on a mission to win this title to quench an 11-year drought internationally and 4 years of nothing overall.

Maybe it is not the Libertadores, as not very many people are interested until the quarterfinals, but it is football. Fox must be crossing their fingers for River Plate to win it all as that would automatically help their rating for next summer's Recopa as they would face none other than- Boca Juniors.

Learn more about this author, Juan Arango.
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