Italy’s Trentino Volley will have the opportunity to go for a fifth straight title as the team around Bulgarian-born head coach Radostin Stoytchev got a wild-card from FIVB to join the 2013 Men’s Club World Championship taking place through October 15-20 in Brazil.
Since the FIVB Club World Championships were re-introduced in 2009, Trentino Volley has dominated the scene there by sweeping the past four editions, lastly winning the trophy this past October at Doha. With their performance the players of Trentino have continued and prolonged Italy’s supremacy in the competition, as clubs from this country have claimed the title ever since the Championship was established in 1989. This also means that Europe will be represented in the 2013 edition by two teams, as Trentino joins Russia’s Lokomotiv Novosibirsk, i.e. the winners of the 2013 CEV Volleyball Champions League whose final four was held this past March 16-17 in Omsk. The 2013 FIVB Men’s Club World Championship will see a total of eight teams play for gold in a venue still to be determined.
Trentino and Lokomotiv will be joined there by Asia’s and Africa’s club champions, namely Iran’s Kalleh and Tunisia’s Sfax respectively, plus two teams from the host country, one to be nominated by the NORCECA Confederation – where no club championship is played – and also by the winner of the South American Club Championship that are set to run through May 8-12 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
The eight participating teams will be divided into two preliminary groups of four each and at the end of a single round robin the first and second ranked side will be playing crossed semifinals, with the 2013 Club World champions set to be crowned on October 20.
The other question is the rightness of the wild cart’s grant for Trentino Volley. Did this team diserved? Obviously, they won the Club World Championship four times in a row, however, it does not mean that the Italian team should play in this tournament every year, in particular if Trentino had already been collapsed in top 12 from the Champions League. A natural candidate to book a ticket to Brazil seemed to be Bre Banca Lanutti Cuneo, which brought about the silver medal from the Champions League Final Four but FIVB unfortunately has chosen another odd solution and invited Trentino. What criteria was decided?