Young Arsenal midfielder Denilson has proved to be quite a sensation this season. The 19 year old arrived as an unknown (both in Brazil and Europe) when he was signed from Sao Paulo last summer, but he has shown fantastic attitude, committment and skill.

He's very tenacious and highly confident (Thierry henry said he was like Cesc - when he came in for training he showed no nerves, and played like he owned the place). He's had no problems settling in, and has turned in some sterling performances having forced his way into the team since December. Although his inexperience has shown, he will get better and better.

He's been called up for Brazil already this season (without having played), and I wouldn't be surprised to see him goto the Copa America this summer and show the world what he's capable of. Some of the top players like Gilberto and Emerson have had very difficult seasons, so Denilson playing would give them a break. Dunga also has a fondness for unheralded players, so i'm fully expecting this to happen. Since Denilson hasn't played a whole lot this year, he would be in good shape for the Copa America and it would give him great experience for the coming season at Ashburton Grove.

Well, I suppose change is never really a bad thing, but let's see what happens. Lennart Johansson has been a stalwart of European football for years, often managing to stave off Sepp Blatter and his ridiculous ideas. They were always big rivals, Blatter and Johannsen, but who was always the one with alelgations of corruption, bribery and controversy over his head? The answer is Blatter. Still, old Lennart held his UEFA place, and Blatter kept on hanging on to that FIFA presidency (chances are he will again).

Platini is by all means an interesting candidate. A legendary footballer, and an intelligent if (often unnecessarily) outspoken candidate, who at 51 is a pup in a world of heavyweight dinosaurs; Blatter is 71, Johansson is 78, Nicolás Léoz (the CONMEBOL president) is 79, and so on and so forth. The Frenchman should by all means offer a great many things to the European footballing community, despite his slightly radical stance.

But the worry behind all of this, is that Platini is Sepp Blatter's little puppy. Whether he will ultimately carry out his own agendas or those of Blatter remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, Blatter has for years tried to interfere in European football, but had very little success because that has always been Johansson's domain (and I think I speak for most people when I say I am glad of this). Now things might be different - Blatter has a means to push his ideas and schemes into the most powerful body in club football. I hope that Platini has the strength and vision to really want to make change happen, but he has come riding in on Blatter's horse, and one wonders whether he can carry himself without the the support of the ageing Swiss megalomaniac.

Platini's first priority seems to be to reformulate the Champions League, where he wants to limit the participation of the top leagues to 3 clubs each - whether this means more participation for smaller leagues or a smaller competition, remains unclear. It's a Catch-22 situation really; Johansson reformulated the European Cup to the Champions League and it became a watershed in modern club football. He concentrated the best clubs in Europe (some might say the world), into an intriguing contest which offered up varied matches and tons of money to everyone involved. The Champions League is a hallmark competition, and although UEFA has not done too well with the UEFA Cup, Lennart Johansson must be given credit.

However one complaint was always that the Champions League catered to the big clubs and leagues, with seeding and coefficients and the format etc. So one can see how Platini's stance is positive (and he has received a lot of backing from many of the smaller football bodies), but at the same time the whole draw of watching the Champions League was that it was the pinnacle of club football. Unbelievably good games and matchups of the biggest names in football. Occassionally a smaller or surprise name was thrown up and did quite well (in recent years Porto, Monaco, Leverkusen, Leeds, Dortmund), and the tournament was ultimately meritocratic, if slightly harder for teams having to qualify. Platini's involvement threatens to dilute the quality of the competition, and upset a lot of existing balances. The good thing is that the G-14 have new representation in David Dein, and he has shown a lot of positivity towarsd working with Platini. Hopefully things work out well.

For the record, the voting was apparently very tense stuff, and there was a lot of bad blood invovled. Yesterday, in the first round of voting, Platini came out on top 26-25, then Johansson usurped him 26-25, and finally today Platini won 27-23. (OK, my numbers might be incorrect, but this was loosely how it went). You never know though, with Blatter involved, if sketchy, underhanded things are going on or not.

It's 2007, and the blogging goes on. It's been a good weekend of football, and Arsenal beat Liverpool at Anfield 3-1 with two absolute corkers from Tomas Rosicky. Henrik Larsson scored his first goal for Man United, and Kiraly did his first blunder for Villa, as the reds won 2-1, and Tottenham embarassed themselves a bit with a goalless draw against Cardiff at Ninian Park. Charlton and the lovely Alan Pardew went one step further and lost 2-0 to Nottingham Forest.

There are some interesting blogs kicking around the site, with a distinctly Arsenal flavour. There's one on Freddie Ljungberg, Arjun's done a great bit on Flamini and tackling, Mauricio brings us the latest news on Alexandre Pato, and you can enjoy Footie Girl's excellent FA Cup Preview with a good dose of hindsight. Teo gives us the latest on the Melbourne Victory, and our Chinese correspondent Zhixiang gives us some info on Charlton's new signing - China captain Zheng Zhi.

Enjoy! And please get in touch with your feedback, or if you would like to write.

Hello readers,

As you may have noticed (or may not have, obviously), we've now got a little User Contributed News section going on the site, and i'd like to encourage you to play around with it, and obviously send us the football news that you think people should know about.

We've also added a handy little login feature on the right hand side, and we hope that our live scores, fixtures and tables will be ready for you quite soon as well.

So keep checking in, and if you have a minute, then register.

We're busy here at OleOle, but we're going to enjoy a few days off for the festive period, and we'd like to give our best wishes to all our readers and contributers as well.

It's disconcerting, because this is supposed to be a fair contest with beautiful football.

But there really seem to be just two rules:

1. Give Barca close calls in their favour, maybe it's their reputation?

2. Ronaldinho cannot be touched. Ever.

Mohammad Abou Tarika scored two lovely goals (in which the enigmatic Flavio played a big part), sandwiching a Cuauhtemoc Blano inspired goal for Salvador Cabanas. The Ahly fans were happy, and the Club America fans sang non-stop and had some cause for cheer with the goal. Both of these however, were outnumbered by the Inter fans.

It seems that the tickets for the final(s) were sold combined... a matches 6/7 ticket. So understandably, there are a lot of Inter fans. They have come out early, watch an average game of football, and really enjoyed themselves and made a day of it. The sang in fits and spurts, and cheered for Ahly every now and then (there was some Egyptian red mixed in with the vats of Internacional fans).

Barca fans however were more or less nowhere to be seen. There were of course thousands of Japanese fans wearing Barca shirts, but that is because the Japanese fans have plumped for Barca before the tournament started, and all the bootleg merchandisers are just selling Barca/Ronaldinho stuff, and all the Japanese fans are buying them in droves.

I mean that the "real" Barca fans were missing. The travelling contingent, people like the friendly (but arrogant) types we met in the Wall Street Club in Roppongi. The Inter fans displayed a real zest for football, and are enjoying the event. The Barca fans don't seem to be really concerned.

This just adds to the feeling that Europe doesn't really care.

BTW the guy from La Gazzetta dello Sport is playing Minesweeper in front of me.

After I stupidly drank the water I was supposed to rinse my mouth and wash my hands with at the Meiji shrine in Harajuku yesterday, oddness ensued sometime later. This is the same water that everyone else washes their hands with, and in my ongoingly poor attempts at sign language in Tokyo, this was just the latest in a series of interesting misunderstandings.

So then, a few hours later as my stomach rumbled and my paranoia rumbled even more, I began contemplating a bit of death, and thought... "You know... it's OK as long as it happens after Sunday, because I really don't want to miss the football". And so now that brings us to today. My stomach feels fine (last night's drinks and thus-induced visit to McDonald's excepted). The sun unfortunately is not shining as it should be, but that's alright because they have lights in stadiums these days.

So the schedule goes a little something like this:

4.20 PM - Al-Ahly vs Club America
7.20 PM - Barcelona vs Internacional

Obviously, I have probably got the home and away teams mixed up there, but really since it's an Egyptian, a Mexican, a Spanish and a Brazilian team playing in Yokohama, Japan, I don't think it matters too much.

Well stay tuned for our coverage as always, blogging on the spot (this would be a nice time for a "blogspot" pun, but then... would we be sued?).

Al-Ahly will be the more motivated of the two teams in their contest, and there should be some good football on show. Claudio Lopez and Blanco will probably be rested, but Ahly's 3 centrebacks shouldn't breathe too easily because Nelson Cuevas can kill any defence when he's up for it. Islam Al-Shater will continue to bomb down the right flank for the Egyptians, and we have to see what frame of mind Flavio will be in today before making any kind of prediction or judgment. Still, there will be some attractive football on show.

As for Barca and Inter, it will be a tough contest. The Brazilians will be fighting hard in this game, taking a more Argentine or Uruguayan approach some might say. But they will try to play their football whenever they can. This might be a cracking match, maybe not as free-flowing and attacking as the Barca-America or Inter-Ahly games, but definitely an intense, exciting contest.

So stay tuned, and find a TV to watch the games if you can, because you'll miss out on some good football otherwise. Don't believe the people who say "It's a joke cup", and "no one really cares", they're full of shit.

Well a match that was expected to be completely empty has in fact managed to draw a quite sizeable crowd, the stadium is quite full, although it's probably a lot of people who were able to get cheap tickets, or saw the Barca match last night and just wanted to get in on the action before it was all gone.

It must be said about the Japanese fans, that although they are not the most knowledgable bunch, the certainly are enthusiastic. The oohs and aahs for Ronaldinho's every touch yesterday have been closely matched by the gasps everytime Auckland City second-half substitute Teruo Iwamoto has touched the ball. A decent player in his younger days, he offered his services to Auckland City for the tournament, and as far as PR and media battles go, Auckland City have been winners, because that's one of the only reasons that there are fans in the ground.

There are a few Koreans set up in the corner though, with a banner that says "Best in Corea". They are singing and chanting a bit, and even though there's only about 30-40 of them, they're making a fair amount of noise.

Auckland unfortunately have no fans, all you hear is the occasional yell of a perhaps drunken expat every now and then. Football is not really big in New Zealand, and from my own experiences living in Dunedin (the home of Otago United, who play in the same league as Auckland City), i'd be shocked if they they played in front of crowds of more than 50-100 people.

Although Auckland haven't really played above their level (amateur), especially their players when interacting with the media. Always chatty, and happy to share their experienices, we hope to bring you some material from them after the game.

It's 3-0 to Jeonbuk right now, after 88 minutes, and i'm sure everyone here would love it if Auckland could score a consolation goal, which would be their first of the tournament.

The atmosphere has been utterly brilliant. The stadium is majestic, and sold out. The press boxes are excellent with internet and power connections, hence this post. What more could we have asked for.

Compared to the other games so far the atmosphere here is seriously good. All the Japanese fans are going for Barca, but it's the few hundred Club America fans in the corner that havae been making the noise. They've been singing non-stop and putting their European counterparts to shame.

Matchwise, Barca took control early on, and are 2-0 up. But Claudio Lopez had a one-on-one situation with the goalkeeper early on, and if he'd taken his chances, things might be quite, quite different now.

Both Barca and America have been playing some good stuff, but the difference is that Barca look infinitely more intimidating when they go forward. Blano is on the bench, and might pop up for this half.

Stay tuned, the second half has kicked off, and i'm getting back to the action. Ta.

The general impression from most media sites, and European fans, is that no one cares about the Club World Cup.

I started a thread about it on a forum I frequent, and apart from a few replies, the majority of the people replied with "Who cares" or "What a joke" or "It's a Mickey Mouse Cup" things like that.

So really how should FIFA make people care about a tournament such as this?

The concept of a Club World Cup is fantastic. The idea that the best clubs around the world might be playing in a tournament against each other really should be mouth-watering. It's the one thing we never really get to see in football (apart from the confederation regionals of course), and it's the one thing that really should give us a great taste of international matchups. Truthfully speaking, the World Cup is generally rubbish. National football teams are generally disjointed, because the players play together for about a month or two every year. They also have a lot of players who have already played 50-65 games for their clubs already. End result - tired, disjointed teams, playing against other tired, dsjointed teams. Don't con yourself into thinking that the end matches of the World Cup are exciting stuff, it's usually not the case. What is more accurate, i'd say, is that the football at the start of the tournament is so dire, that by the time the football has improved you think that you're watching Brazil... which is not the case, unless you are actually watching Brazil... losing to France, in a boring, somewhat insipid match. What really does increase interest is the World Cup, is that fans have vested national interests, and so seeing a stubmling, frustrating match is fine, as long as it's a win for their team (which most will still confuse with it being a good football match).

The problem is that out of the many hundreds of countries worldwide, only 32 actually play the World Cup, and although you can adopt a team for the tournament, it's really not the same thing as your own country playing. But for many of us, there will never be any chance to see our teams play at the World Cup... who knows when India will qualify for example?

Now consider club teams, everyone supports them, from all over the World. Arsenal fans in Malaysia are just as passionate as the ones in England, kids in Africa drop everything to watch Premiership and La Liga matches, and immigrant communities means that club fanbases are scattered EVERYWHERE. So there's no question that club football has far more support.

Now club footballers also train together for the whole year, and are proper teams. And the best club sides have the best players in the world, something that national teams can't have (although the Qataris tried didn't they!).

So then feast on the thought of this, a tournament featuring the top 5 or so teams from each regional confederation, in a true test of the footballing styles and ability of each, and the best examples of the footballing ability of those regions. Imagine the benefits to those clubs, as well as FIFA... Club fans have way more enthusiasm and they would be out in numbers from all over the world. This would be a tournament that is potentially bigger than the Champions League, and money would flow in from all firections, and merchandising opportunities would be huge.

The problem is UEFA, and making Europe care, because it seems like they don't. In South America, it's the biggest thing going, and one of the big incentives for winning the Libertadores. Contrast that to the Champions League, where winning it means "Oh shoot, we have to go and muddle around in Tokyo for a week in December". Not on.

A global club competitions would truly present fantastic, varied football, but it needs to be carefully thought up and organised. In the short term, perhaps things could be improved by adding in the UEFA Cup and Copa Sudamericana winners, as well as perhaps the runners-up from various confederations. And qualifying could be introduced easily enough.