The 2025 Club World Cup has a format and a start date, June 15. It has a host country, the United States. has an “emblem”, which was announced with considerable fanfare earlier this month.
But the novel 32-team tournament, conceived by FIFA to reshape club football, still has no broadcasters or sponsors. Less than nine months after its launch, it has no stadiums to host matches, no tickets on sale and no dates for any of these announcements.
FIFA is currently engaged in negotiations with potential host countries, several sources briefed on the talks told Yahoo Sports. But a related problem is that it apparently does not yet have the full backing of prestigious European clubs.
“It’s not clear yet,” Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti said on Friday when asked about the possibility of playing both the Club World Cup in June and the Intercontinental Cup, another FIFA competition that has replaced the old Club World Cup, in December.
Almost everything is confused because of money.
European clubs, according to reports and a source familiar with the situation, want UEFA Champions League-level payments as compensation for their participation. (Real Madrid, for example, could earn close to $100 million in a single year under the supervision of a UEFA club.) The new UEFA Champions League prize money system.)
But FIFA has struggled to sell television and commercial rights to the still-unproven Club World Cup, so is presumably hesitant to guarantee such large payouts.
Players have also expressed concern about their increasing workload. Trade unions are taking legal action against FIFA, with this new expanded Club World Cup being the “turning point”. Some have suggested that attacks are possible, or even “close”, as demonstrated by Manchester City midfielder Rodri said this week.
With enthusiasm low, controversy rising and the football calendar oversaturated (and with popular clubs such as Barcelona, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal not taking part in the 2025 tournament), major television networks and multinational companies have reportedly He valued the competition well below the prices requested by FIFA.
So it seems FIFA is getting desperate. Athletic reported On Thursday, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, the all-powerful mastermind and driving force behind this Club World Cup, called a meeting on Friday with broadcasting executives from around the world to drum up interest.
FIFA also quietly changed the name of the tournament from “FIFA Club World Cup” to “FIFA Club World Cup”.
He announced that “Freed from Desire” by Italian singer Gala will be the tournament’s “signature sound,” rather than just a popular song played at countless European sporting and football events, including the Paris Olympics last summer.
Promoted the new logo and social media posts of qualified clubs, as evidence that everyone was committed.
The clubs have, in fact, publicly expressed their commitment. “Our club will participate,” Real Madrid said in a June statement after Ancelotti said in an interview that Madrid and others would “reject the invitation.” Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who chairs the European Club Association (ECA), reportedly joined Infantino at Friday’s meeting with broadcasters, a sign that prominent clubs are willing to work with FIFA to bring the new competition to life.
However, negotiations are ongoing and details are unknown. One source suggested to Yahoo Sports that upcoming meetings with the ECA, an umbrella group representing the interests of a wide range of European clubs, would be key to finalising financial arrangements for the tournament.
FIFA Club World Cup struggles for funding
Finance has always been a central issue in the expanded Club World Cup. It is Infantino’s latest strategy to claw back market share from UEFA, European soccer’s governing body whose annual revenues outstrip those of FIFA, the world governing body.
But to launch a competition that could compete with the UEFA Champions League – a quadrennial World Cup-style tournament with broad appeal and a great atmosphere – Infantino always needed funding. It is currently unclear what the sources of that funding will be.
Years ago, there was information that an international consortium of investors, Led by the richest man in Japan at the timewould fund the tournament with billions of dollars, but that deal met with resistance and never materialized.
More recently, earlier this year, Apple and FIFA reportedly It came close to reaching a deal for global broadcast rights, but that too fell through, perhaps because handing exclusive rights to a pay-per-view streaming service would limit the Club World Cup’s reach and appeal to sponsors.
So FIFA opened the tender for broadcasting rights In July and AugustMeanwhile, over the past month, it has announced two new sponsors for the 2026 World Cup, Bank of America and From Lay — but none of the announcements mentioned the 2025 Club World Cup.
And in the American cities that have committed to hosting the 2026 World Cup, there is nowhere near the same level of commitment and support for the 2025 Club World Cup, because it doesn’t have anywhere near the same level of visibility or economic impact. So many of the costs covered by local host committees, taxpayers and stadiums in 2026 will fall to FIFA in 2025 — and some will be avoided, making the Club World Cup less of a spectacle.
FIFA’s options, then, are narrowing. It could settle for whatever it can get from sponsors and broadcasters. It could plead with a friendly entity in a petrostate to fund the tournament. Or it could accept that this first edition of the expanded Club World Cup will not be the bonanza initially promised and essentially pay out of its own pocket to get the concept off the ground, with an eye toward commercial success in 2029 and beyond.
Overworked players hint at possible strike
All this uncertainty could undermine the tournament, which is due to go ahead anyway, unless players take collective action.
“If anything is going to change, it has to come from the players,” Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola said on Friday.
In recent years, coaches and players alike have constantly complained about the backlog of fixtures, but 2024 has increased their urgency and changed the tone of the conversation. Many played the full 2023-24 season and then spent a month with their national teams at the European Championships or Copa America. Then, after truncated seasons (many had less than a month off), they returned to club seasons, which, in addition to domestic leagues and cups, preseason tours around the world and international windows, now include two or four extra Champions League games.
And then, to top it all off, there is the Club World Cup, scheduled to start on June 15 and end on July 13, after many clubs have already begun their pre-season preparations for the 2025-26 campaign… which will be followed by an expanded World Cup that will end on July 19, 2026.
“It seems that if things continue like this we won’t have a break for a few years,” Atlético Madrid and Argentina midfielder Rodrigo De Paul said this week. “I think it’s something that needs to be analysed. We are human beings and in the end everyone needs time to recover.”
“If it continues like this,” said Manchester City’s Rodri, “it will be a moment when we will have no other option (but to attack).
“But let’s see. I don’t know,” he concluded. “I don’t know what will happen. But it is something that worries us, because we are the ones who suffer.”