SoccerSoccerWhat to make of FIFA’s controversial bet on global club soccer, which represented the extremes of both the greatness and the greed of the sport
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By Leander SchaerlaeckensJuly 14, 1:11 pm UTC • 7 min
In the end, FIFA president Gianni Infantino got exactly what he wanted out of his newly revamped Club World Cup. A showdown between a pair of European powerhouses in the tournament’s signature game.
Before the awarding of the trophy with Infantino’s name on it, the finale of his fever dream unfurled in the heat and cloaking humidity of mid-summer New Jersey at MetLife Stadium on Sunday afternoon.
It was all there. A marching band. Fireworks. Pillars of golden smoke. A giant blow-up version of the trophy’s orbiting rings. A pre-game performance by Robbie Williams—who FIFA apparently believes is someone Americans know. An appearance by President Donald Trump, who was loudly booed when he was briefly shown on the big screen during the national anthem and again during the trophy ceremony. A fighter jet flyover. A halftime show packed with star power.
FIFA had finally done it. It had created a knockoff Super Bowl. It even got a spectacle on the field—for one half, anyway.
In a narrative-shredding upset, Chelsea, the fourth-best team in the English Premier League, which won barely half its league games in the 2024-25 campaign, dismantled Paris Saint-Germain, the runaway European champions and consensus favorites for Sunday’s final. PSG had pantsed Inter Milan 5-0 in the UEFA Champions League final on May 31, a record margin for the title match. Then it had run roughshod over much of its competition in this tournament, scoring 16 goals and conceding just one, humiliating mighty Real Madrid 4-0 in the semifinals.
But on Sunday, two well-placed curlers from Cole Palmer and a delightful dink by João Pedro, finishing off a series of counterattacks, made it 3-0 to the Blues before the halftime break. That was the difference. “I consider them the best team in the world with one of the best managers in the world,” Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca said of PSG after the game. “Fantastic players. So today has been a top, top achievement.”
This was a very modern soccer matchup between two teams that became global powers through lavish investment from outsiders—Chelsea the beneficiaries of a Russian oligarch and then American investors; PSG a soft power play by Qatar. This was fitting, since money was exactly what Infantino was after in forcing this tournament into existence. To muscle in on UEFA’s monopoly on the most valuable club games in the world, to syphon off some of the riches flowing from all that star power.
Infantino, in fact, got a series of box office games between the planet’s most marketable sports teams. And we should be honest about it: Despite the heat and all the travel and the compounding exhaustion at the end of a European club campaign that began way back in August of 2024, a lot of the soccer was good and fun. That’s why even the sport’s most craven ventures tend to work out—the beautiful game is still the beautiful game.
The Club World Cup produced a bona fide Cinderella story when New Zealand’s non-professional Auckland City FC tied with Argentina’s storied Boca Juniors, following Auckland’s 10-0 and 6-0 losses to Bayern and Benfica, respectively. Saudi Arabia’s Al-Hilal knocked out heavyweight Manchester City in a thrilling 4-3 extra time win. And the competition gave us some surprising performances by the four-club contingent from Brazil: Botafogo was the only team to beat PSG before the final, and Fluminense made an impressive run to the semifinal.
There was even a delightful, only-in-soccer story in the form of Egyptian YouTubers making fake highlights for Club World Cup matches that hadn’t even happened yet, earning 14 million views and subsequent advertising revenue.
Yet the tournament’s legacy is still to be determined. Its ripple effects will reverberate through the sport for another year at least. How will the extension of the European club season by another six weeks affect the upcoming season? Elite players’ workloads had already been stretched to a breaking point. And then next summer, there’s an actual World Cup on the schedule. Perhaps former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp said it best when he predicted that “next season we will see injuries like never before.”
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola is of the same mind. “Maybe in November, December, January, … I may say: ‘So listen, we are a disaster. We are exhausted. The [Club] World Cup destroyed us,’” Guardiola said.
In another way, the Club World Cup did not go the way Infantino must have hoped it would.
There were myriad and genuine reasons for being skeptical of this tournament—its bloat, peril to player welfare, barely-disguised backing from Saudi Arabia, bilking of fans, and on and on—and none of them really turned out to be wrong.
FIFA booked some of America’s most cavernous stadiums even for games unlikely to fill them, especially at the towering prices tickets were initially listed for. Tellingly, the “dynamic” pricing meant that the cheapest tickets for Tuesday’s Fluminense-Chelsea semifinal at MetLife had to be cut from $474 to just $13 in the days leading up to the game just to mostly fill the venue.
During the group stage, 14 games drew fewer than 20,000 fans. Three of those games were played at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, Seattle’s Lumen Field, and Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, which all have a capacity of at least 65,000. The vast stretches of empty seats made for a sorry sight.
“I prefer to put 35,000 people in an 80,000-seat stadium than 20,000 in a 20,000-seat stadium,” Infantino said on Saturday.
The 63-game tournament only sold out one game, the very last one. Per The Guardian’s count, average attendance amounted to just 63 percent of stadium capacity over the course of the tournament, with just under 2.5 million seats occupied and almost 1.5 million remaining empty. FIFA, it turns out, cannot simply summon fans to show up wherever, whenever, to watch a game between whomever, at whatever price. Just putting on an event and affixing it with the “FIFA” and “World Cup” labels doesn’t guarantee the fans will come.
This is an important realization in planning next year’s World Cup proper in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, which will swell to 48 teams from 32 in 2022. If this new Club World Cup format offered something of a dry run and preview of next year’s mega-event, it illuminated other issues.
Chelsea had to abandon a practice session because of the summer heat, with Maresca complaining that the conditions didn’t allow his team to prepare properly, forcing it to conserve energy instead. And midfielder Enzo Fernández recalled that he got dizzy in the win over Fluminense and had to sit down during the game. “I had to go on the ground,” he said. “The truth is, playing at that time is very dangerous. … Let’s hope for next year they change the times so, more than anything, the football continues to be nice and attractive.”
FIFA, to its credit, has acknowledged the weather problem. “Of course, the heat is an issue,” Infantino said Saturday. “But we have stadiums with roofs, and we will definitely use these stadiums during the day next year.” The trouble is, just four of the 16 selected stadiums can close.
But the hot weather and sometimes tepid crowd sizes weren’t the only intrusions on Infantino’s grand vision. There was the baffling spectacle of a band of Juventus players—including U.S. national teamers Weston McKennie and Tim Weah—getting dragged into the Oval Office during a White House visit without being consulted. What was planned as a simple photo-op went off the rails as one of Italy’s most storied clubs wound up serving as a backdrop while President Trump talked about transgender athletes and Iran.
Plainly, there will be politics at next year’s World Cup, whether the players and teams wish to engage or not. Infantino’s cozying up to Trump shows no signs of abating after announcing that FIFA will move into office space in the Trump Tower, with the governing body calling the building “iconic” in a press release.
And the Trump administration’s darkest impulses will loom heavily over the entire thing. A since-deleted post on X by U.S. Customs & Border Protection, claiming it was “suited and booted” and “ready to provide security” for the Club World Cup, cast a pall over the tournament’s opening, and potentially scared away potential fans. There may well be more of that.
Infantino claimed on Saturday that the tournament was “definitively … a huge, huge, huge success” and that “the golden era of global club football has started.” He pointed to revenues of almost $2.1 billion, or $33 million per game, which he said out-earned any other club competition in the world. That’s a lot of money, certainly. FIFA earned $7.5 billion on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
But FIFA’s estimate of a global audience of 20 million viewers for the Club World Cup on the DAZN streaming service suggests a modest footprint, even if domestic broadcasters all over the world picked up the game feeds and likely multiplied that number. By comparison, the last two World Cup finals alone each had a viewership of over a billion. A typical Real Madrid-FC Barcelona classico tends to draw over half a billion viewers.
The thing is, if, as a global governing body, you measure success—or huge, huge, huge success—by how much money you’ve brought in, rather than whether you’ve grown the sport you’ve been tasked with shepherding, none of the rest particularly matters.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a regular contributor on soccer to The Ringer. ‘The Long Game,’ his book on the United States men’s national team, will be published by Viking Books ahead of the 2026 World Cup. He teaches at Marist University.
