FIFA have announced a 32-team Club World Cup from 2025, but dealing with the biggest teams will be very different to already craven national associations.
In this case, they decided to leave the details until later. In some respects, it’s difficult to know quite what to make of a 32-team Club World Cup, as announced by FIFA in the news vacuum between the World Cup semi-finals and final. While feverishly announcing it, Gianni Infantino left out most details apart from when it will actually be played.
To accommodate this sparkly new trophy FIFA will be messing with the international calendar again, with another summer men’s tournament being added from June 2025. As ever, no thought appears to have been put into how clubs may feel about all of this, including whether player welfare is being considered in any way whatsoever.
So what would a 32-team Club World Cup look like? The current version of this tournament may be deeply flawed, but at least it follows a logical path. The champions of each FIFA confederation are immediately qualified for the tournament, plus one team from the host nation, playing in a staggered knockout competition in which the European and South American teams sit out the opening rounds.
This meant that in 2021 both of the finalists, Chelsea and Palmeiras, joined the competition at the semi-final stage; to be crowned as the champions of global club football the most likely winners – since relaunching in 2000, five of the Club World Cup’s 36 finalists have come from outside of Europe or South America and none have won it – only played two games get there.
With 32 teams playing from 2025, how are the entrants to be decided? If it’s to mirror the World Cup in any way, we might assume a similar numbers of teams per confederation. That’s to say, 13 from Europe, four or five each from South America and Asia, five from Africa, three or four from North and Central America and the Caribbean, none or one from Oceania and the host nation. FIFA has used this formula for the World Cup since 2006.
But… then what? At present, the continental trophies act as appropriate qualifiers for the Club World Cup. Win that and you’re in. But how do they determine which 13 European teams get through? Just pick all eight quarter-finalists and the, umm, five best round-of-16 losers from the Champions League? Or are the Europa League and Europa Conference League finalists roped in as well?
Another issue is highlighted by qualification from South America. In this year’s Copa Libertadores, all eight of the quarter-finalists and 11 of the last 16 came from either Brazil or South America. So do FIFA go with four or five different teams each from a different country, sacrificing any idea of meritocracy at the altar of broad representations, or do they just pack it with famous names from the two large countries on that continent? And would they expect clubs to play intercontinental play-offs, as they do nation states?
The obvious biggest flaw in FIFA’s proposals is that the fault-lines of the club game are simply not the same as the fault-lines of the international game. In Europe, money, power and success is concentrated in largely in just five countries: England, Spain, Italy, France and Germany. In South America, it’s two.
Perhaps the first question that FIFA is going to have to ask itself is whether it wants 32 teams from 32 countries – they could theoretically bypass continental champions and select national ones instead – or the best teams on the planet, because the truth of the matter is that they can’t have both at the same time.
Furthermore, from a political angle they can expect precious little assistance from UEFA, who may well see all of this as this FIFA barging in on territory that has been held by the Champions League for decades, and some of whose federations are still spitting feathers over Qatar 2022. But even in other confederations that may be more amenable to just doing whatever the hell FIFA tells them to do, that selection process looks far from straightforward.
Then there’s the small matter of what the biggest clubs themselves might think of it all, which seems all the more important because there is precious little evidence that even they’ve been consulted about this. These clubs are nothing like national associations who will roll over and let FIFA tickle their collective bellies. They’ve found the terrain of club football pleasingly landscaped towards their best interests over the last three decades, and they’ll have little compunction about objecting if this tournament isn’t all set up in a way that benefits them.
This brings us onto perhaps the most important question of all that FIFA will have to answer: how do they sell this to viewers or supporters? The fans themselves already know their hierarchy for what matters, and in Europe it seems implausible that FIFA’s Club World Cup will usurp the Champions League at the top of their affections.
And while the neutral viewers can and do take interest in World Cup matches between less than powerful nations, it seems unlikely that they will offer the same to the club game. Manchester City vs Esperence de Tunis, for example, is a very different prospect to England vs Tunisia. It’s fair to say that to make such an assumption is somewhat Euro-centric, but to pretend that the size and financial clout of the European audience simply don’t matter seems a little naive. And no matter how powerful or omnipotent FIFA may consider themselves to be, they can’t force people to care.
The early signs on the front of persuading clubs don’t seem very encouraging, with the World Leagues Forum (WLF), the world association of professional football leagues, issuing a statement within hours of FIFA’s announcement stating that the expanded Club World Cup could have ‘damaging consequences for the football economy’.
Their criticism was very much of the withering variety: that ‘FIFA’s decision creates the risk of fixture congestion, further player injuries and distortion of competitive balance’; that ‘the interests of the football community, which we expect FIFA to take care of, are not best-served by piling-up FIFA-owned matches which only involve the top 1% of players’; and that ‘we should all expect FIFA to create the environment for a complementary balance between domestic and international football for the benefit of the whole game’.
It says much about FIFA’s tone-deafness that they should announce more FIFA tampering at the end of a tournament that has been blighted by corruption and an iron fist of autocracy for more than a decade. But the biggest clubs will be a very different beast to those supine national associations who’ve handed FIFA’s executive what it’s wanted for decades, and if FIFA do seriously believe that they can just utilise these clubs to make themselves another massive profit, well, they clearly haven’t been paying enough attention to how those clubs carry themselves.
The idea of having a Club World Champion feels great in principle, but the problem is that the football calendar has no space for the sort of tournament required to decide who this should be, while even the format only seems likely to be as flawed as ever. FIFA are unlikely to think in those terms. This is a landgrab, just the same as all the others. But they’ll be grabbing land from somebody quite different this time, and it wouldn’t be surprising to find at a point in the future that this time they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.
