Rare is the day a player earns a first start for their new team in the semifinal of a competition despite being under contract with an entirely different club during the group stage, but leave it to the new-look Club World Cup to shoehorn a new quirk into the structured soccer calendar.

Fluminense’s journey in the Club World Cup has been nothing short of remarkable. Running on financial fumes, they’ve slayed European giants and Saudi money machines. Thiago Silva, a beloved former Chelsea figure now spending his final footballing days captaining his boyhood club,