The 2025 Club World Cup has a format and a start date, June 15. It has a host country, the United States. It has an “emblem,” which was announced with great fanfare earlier this month.
But the new 32-team tournament, which FIFA devised to reshape club football, has no broadcasters or sponsors. With the opening less than nine months away, there are no stadiums to host matches. There are no tickets on sale. There are no dates for these announcements.
FIFA is in talks with potential locations, multiple sources with knowledge of the talks told Yahoo Sports. But another related issue is that it apparently doesn’t have all of Europe’s prestigious clubs fully on board yet.
“It’s still not clear,” Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti said on Friday when asked about the prospect of playing in both the Club World Cup in June and the Intercontinental Cup, another FIFA competition that replaced the old Club World Cup, in December.
Money makes almost everything unclear.
According to reports and a source familiar with the matter, the European clubs want a UEFA Champions League-level payout as compensation for their participation. (Real Madrid, for example, could earn more than $100 million in a single year under UEFA’s new Champions League prize money system.)
But FIFA has struggled to sell TV and commercial rights to the unproven Club World Cup, and is likely reluctant to guarantee such large payouts.
Players have also voiced concerns about their ever-increasing workloads. Unions are taking legal action against FIFA, with this new, expanded Club World Cup seen as the “tipping point”. Some have suggested that strikes are possible, or even “close”, as Manchester City midfielder Rodri said this week.
With enthusiasm waning, controversy mounting and the football calendar oversaturated (with popular clubs such as Barcelona, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal opting out of the 2025 tournament), major TV networks and multinationals have reportedly valued the competition well below FIFA’s asking price.
FIFA appears to be getting desperate. The Athletic reported Thursday that FIFA president Gianni Infantino, the all-powerful mastermind and driving force behind this Club World Cup, has called a meeting with broadcasting executives from around the world on Friday to drum up interest.
FIFA also quietly changed the name of the tournament, from “Mundial de Clubes FIFA” to “FIFA Club World Cup.”
It was announced that Italian singer Gala’s “Freed from Desire” would become the tournament’s “audio signature” – rather than just a popular song played at countless football and European sporting events, including relentlessly at the Olympic Games in Paris last summer.
The new logo and social media posts from the qualifying clubs were touted as proof that they were all behind it.
The clubs have indeed publicly stated their commitment. “Our club will participate,” Real Madrid said in a statement in June after Ancelotti claimed in an interview that Madrid and others “would decline the invitation.” Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who chairs the European Clubs Association (ECA), reportedly joined Infantino at the meeting with broadcasters on Friday, a sign that leading clubs are willing to work with FIFA to bring the new competition to life.
But negotiations are ongoing and details are unknown. A 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 crucial to ironing out the tournament’s financial arrangements.
FIFA’s Club World Cup struggles with funding
Finance has always been at the heart of the expanded Club World Cup. It is Infantino’s latest ploy to claw back market share from UEFA, the European football governing body whose annual revenues exceed those of FIFA, the global governing body.
But to launch a competition that would challenge the UEFA Champions League — a World Cup-like, quadrennial tournament with broad appeal and a grand feel — Infantino always needed funding. It’s unclear at this point what the sources of that funding will be.
Years ago, there were reports that an international consortium of investors, led by the then richest man in Japan, would finance the tournament with billions of dollars. But that deal was met with resistance and never came to fruition.
More recently, earlier this year, Apple and FIFA were said to have come close to reaching a deal for global broadcasting rights. But that too failed — perhaps because giving exclusive rights to a streaming service behind a paywall would have limited the Club World Cup’s reach and appeal to sponsors.
So FIFA opened the bidding for broadcast rights in July and August. In the meantime, in the past month-plus, it has announced two new sponsors for the 2026 World Cup, Bank of America and Lay’s — but neither announcement mentioned the 2025 Club World Cup.
And in U.S. cities that have committed to hosting the 2026 World Cup, there is not nearly the same level of involvement or support for the 2025 Club World Cup — because it does not carry nearly the same level of exposure or economic impact. So many of the costs that will be covered by local host committees, taxpayers, and stadiums in 2026 will fall to FIFA in 2025; and some will be shunned, making the Club World Cup less of a spectacle.
FIFA’s options are narrowing, then. It could settle for what it can squeeze out of sponsors and broadcasters. It could beg a friendly entity in a petrostate (Saudi Arabia?) to bankroll the tournament. Or it could accept that this first edition of the expanded Club World Cup won’t be the bonanza it was originally promised to be, and essentially pay out of its own pocket to get the concept off the ground, with an eye on commercial success in 2029 and beyond.
Overworked players point to possible strike
All this uncertainty could weaken the tournament. However, the tournament should still take place unless players take collective action.
“If anything needs to change, it has to come from the players,” Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola said on Friday.
Coaches and players have consistently complained about the buildup to matches in recent years. But 2024 has heightened the urgency and changed the tone of the conversation. Many played out the full 2023-24 season, then spent a month with their national teams at the European Championship or Copa América. Then, after truncated offseasons — many were given less than a month’s vacation — they plunged back into club seasons, which now include two or four extra Champions League matches in addition to domestic leagues and cups, global preseason tours and international windows.
And then, at the end of it all, there is the Club World Cup, scheduled to begin on June 15 and end on July 13 – after many clubs have begun their preparations for the 2025-26 season… which will be followed by an expanded World Cup ending on July 19, 2026.
“It seems that if everything continues, we will not have any free time for years,” Atlético Madrid and Argentine midfielder Rodrigo De Paul said this week. “I think it is something that needs to be analyzed. We are human beings and, in the end, everyone needs time to recover.”
“If it continues like this,” said Man City’s Rodri, “it will be a moment when we have no other option. [but to strike].
“But let’s see. I don’t know,” he concluded. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But it’s something that worries us — because we’re the guys who are suffering.”
