When the draw for the Fifa Club World Cup was made in December, the cheapest ticket for the opening game — to be played on Saturday in Miami, between Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami and the Cairo giants Al-Ahly — was $349. This week, organisers have been trying to sell five tickets for $20. In any normal world, such a lack of demand would be the cause for major concern. But this is modern football.
Whether people will actually turn up to watch almost feels like a minor concern alongside the potential ramifications for football and its place in politics. Since 1960, the South American club champions have been playing their European counterparts for a de facto world title. Since 2000, Fifa, the global governing body, recognising the hold Uefa, the European confederation, has over the elite level of the club game, has been trying to expand that. Cue the Club World Cup: an annual seven-team competition in which a single European side played a maximum of two games. It was done in 10 days, and nobody in Europe paid much attention. So why the massive expansion? The only reason is Fifa’s attempt, in its eternal struggle with Uefa, to increase its influence over the club game and access some of the revenues it generates.
On the face of it, the Club World Cup might seem like a great idea: the globe coming together in sporting celebration. Except we already have such a thing: the World Cup, a tournament for national sides, and which works because there is a rough equality. Since nations have to use the talent allotted to them by geography, rather buying up the best talent from around the world, Senegal can beat England whereas a Senegalese club side would have next to no chance against a Premier League titan. A Club World Cup might have made sense half a century ago, but now the gulf between rich and poor is so vast that mismatches are inevitable.
It’s not just the fans who are unconvinced. Only six months ago, the tournament didn’t have a broadcast partner. Then in February, DAZN, Len Blavatnik’s media company, which has posted losses of at least £1 billion every year since 2019, summoned $1 billion to buy the global rights. Given Fox had offered only $10 million for the US rights, that seemed a vast sum. Coincidentally, a few days later, Surj, a company owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), announced a $1 billion investment in DAZN. Two months earlier, after a bidding process widely regarded as flawed, Saudi Arabia was confirmed by Fifa as the host of the 2034 World Cup. Last week, the Saudi PIF and Qatar Airways were confirmed as Club World Cup partners. It’s fair to say it’s highly unusual for major sponsorship deals like that to be agreed less than two weeks before the start of a competition. After all, these are entities owned by the governments of Qatar (World Cup hosts in 2022) and Saudi Arabia (World Cup hosts in 2034), underwriting a Fifa project whose commercial viability has become increasingly doubtful.
“A Club World Cup might have made sense half a century ago.”
Players are already protesting about how many games they are expected to play, but Fifa is determined to press on, for the political gain and the revenues that may in future accrue. The only gap in the football calendar today — at least from a European point of view, and Europe is where the bulk of football’s money is — is in odd-numbered summers, when there is no men’s World Cup or Euros (the Copa América, the South American championship, runs concurrently with its European equivalent). The fact that players and fans (and journalists) find those odd-numbered summers a useful rest-period, perhaps even necessary, clearly means little to football’s administrators.
And in any case, it’s not actually a free summer. Already, Liam Delap, an emerging star of last season’s Premier League campaign, has been forced to withdraw from the England squad for the Under-21 Euros to play for Chelsea in the Club World Cup, while the tournament can’t but deflect attention from the Women’s Euros.
There is then an issue of qualification, which has edged towards the gimmicky even before the tournament has begun. The World Cup has an established process that goes on for a couple of years before the tournament. But qualification for the Club World Cup is by performance in various other competitions. Real Madrid, Manchester City and Chelsea, for instance, are there as the last three winners of the Uefa Champions League. Al-Ain, Urawa Red Diamonds and Al-Hilal are there as winners of the Asian equivalent.
But at this point, Fifa runs into a problem. You can’t have a team win a league in May and then join a tournament two weeks later. So Fifa is about to kick off a Club World Cup, a competition that at least on some level is about determining the best team in the world, without the reigning champions of England, Spain or Italy, who, arguably, are already at the top of the global game.
Yet once again, it’s hard to avoid the sense that finance trumps integrity. Consider the situation in the US. Here, the season follows a league format followed by play-offs to determine the champion. As Club World Cup hosts, the US gets one additional qualifying slot. It had been assumed that it would go to the overall champion, but Fifa had left enough ambiguity in the protocols that when Messi’s Inter Miami finished top of the table, they were confirmed as qualifiers. For marketing reasons, Fifa had to ensure the presence of Messi, still a great box-office draw. It was just as well that they did, given Inter Miami promptly lost in the play-offs to unfancied Atlanta United.
Messi, though, wasn’t enough. The organisers wanted more. An additional transfer window has been introduced to allow clubs to sign players for the start of the competition. That has two benefits when it comes to marketing the tournament. There is always a glimmer of intrigue, as in pre-season games, in seeing a new signing at his new club, assessing how he fits in: what will Trent Alexander-Arnold be like at Real Madrid?
But the new window also created the possibility of short-term loans. In the end, Cristiano Ronaldo, now 40 and playing in the Saudi league for Al-Nassr but still a huge celebrity, will not be at the tournament, but there were talks about finding him a club, trailed by the Fifa president Gianni Infantino in an interview with the influencer iShowSpeed.
But there’s something even more concerning going on here: the prize money. The $1 billion pot (coincidentally the exact amount of the Saudi PIF’s investment in DAZN, and the exact amount DAZN paid for broadcasting rights) will have a major distorting effect on local leagues, a significant amount particularly when clubs are scrambling to meet the thresholds for Profit and Sustainability Rules. But that is nothing compared to the impact in, say, Argentina, where Boca Juniors and River Plate will each make a minimum of £11.25 million in geographically weighted appearance money; each of the two league champions in Argentina each season receives just £370,000 in prize money. Boca and River are being handed a mammoth advantage for the next few years — which should secure future qualification for the Club World Cup, a permanent seat on the carousel of cash. Auckland City, meanwhile, play in the Dettol Northern League for clubs in the north of New Zealand’s North Island, where player expenses are capped at £70 a week. They will receive £2.56 million even if they lose every game.
So Fifa is staging a tournament that could effectively ruin domestic leagues as functioning competitions. The Club World Cup could finally release Europe’s stranglehold on the club game and lead to a cadre of superclubs too big for their domestic leagues. And if that cadre decided their future lay not in domestic competition but in a global superleague, that would suit Fifa rather well. But it good for football? Why would anybody care about that?
