The 1st FIFA Club World Championship has, for me, been a thoroughly positive experience in many ways. Of course there was the chance to see my adopted team Vasco da Gama going into the finals, but more than that I got to see teams from different countries playing different styles of football, I got to know the fans of those teams and I learned that everybody who loves the game loves it with the same fervent passion no matter where you are in the world.

Now nobody is pretending that all of the teams were on a level footing; the highest paid Manchester United player earns £52,000 a week whilst players for South Melbourne only play part-time, and for the rest of the week have other jobs - such as petrol station attendant. But I think that even the teams who weren't expected to (and didn't) do well threw up a few surprises, such as South Melbourne holding Vasco da Gama to a 0 - 0 draw for the majority of a game and Raja Casablanca spoiling an expected easy win for Real Madrid. In the end it was, of course, the giant teams which got the places in the finals (with the exception of European champions Manchester United, who were kept in 3rd place by Necaxa of Mexico - another of the surprises I mentioned), but no team goes away disgraced from Brazil 2000.

Who should feel ashamed of themselves, however, are the Brazilian media and people. I live in Brazil, and find the people here to be friendly, calm and polite. Which makes it all the more galling to hear arrogant comments such as those by Eurico Miranda, director of Vasco da Gama, who said that "no Manchester United player is good enough for my team"; or those by Juca Kfouri, a TV commentator, who described Middle Eastern football as "grotesque"; or Miranda again, with the comment "The Brazilians are the best players in the world, the Europeans do not even come close." This kind of overwhelming arragance is totally at odds with my image of the Brazilian people. Of course their football is great - everybody knows it - but why the need to make provocative comments such as these? The 3 games that each club has played so far in the tournament may not have been entirely representative of what they are capable of - it's easy to forget that no matter how good a team you are, it only takes one bad match to ruin a campaign, a lesson Brazilians should surely pay attention to after their poor exit from the World Cup in 1998, and Palmeiras' defeat in this years Toyota Cup - at the hands of Manchester United.

And another unforgivable blow was the apathy shown by fans to games which didn't involve Brazilian teams. In the game between Vasco da Gama, 70,000 people were in the Maracanã. When that game ended and the Necaxa - South Melbourne game began, only 1,000 were left. Even though these people had a perfectly valid ticket, they just weren't interested.

It is my belief that Brazil should be denied the chance to host a World Cup (as they wish to do in 2006) until they can learn a lesson in humility and respect for the football of other nations. Nobody expects a country with a proud tradition such as this one to not love their football, but it shouldn't be while hating everybody else's.