An international gathering of each continent's finest footballing representatives, taking place in the Middle East just before Christmas? It's all the rage.

The Arabian Peninsula's charmingly optimistic attempts to make itself the centre of football's universe, which is scheduled to peak with Qatar's $200bn pop-up World Cup in 2022, have continued this month in Abu Dhabi, but the attention of the average football fan hasn't been captured.

The 15th edition of Fifa's muddled, inconvenient and almost laughably lopsided Club World Cup will lope to a close at the Zayed Sports City Stadium on Saturday afternoon, at roughly the same time that the BT Sport cameras will be capturing a beaming Ole Gunnar Solskjaer hopping off the Manchester United team bus in Cardiff. Indeed, no UK broadcaster has bothered to mobilise themselves for what will almost certainly be Real Madrid's fourth processional world title in five years.

On your football-consumption radar, the FIFA Club World Cup UAE 2018 presented by Alibaba Cloud (to grant it its full name) has probably sat just below Burton reaching the Carabao Cup semi-finals and narrowly above the news that Tottenham's new stadium will have the ability to fill pint glasses from underneath.

The competition's 18-year history - for dear want of a better word - is one of administrative faffing, a sizeable dollop of indifference, an intermittent sprinkling of actual footballing magic and a four-year void when the tournament simply didn't happen at all.