FIFA in Deeper – the Failure of the Club World Cup

As FIFA continues to change football from the top down, the Club World Cup has become the most recent competition to undergo a transformation. Is the new format another money-grabbing venture from Gianni Infantino and his gang of thieves, or might it actually serve to benefit the sport?

Football fans have grown increasingly sceptical of the top organisations since 2015, when former FIFA president Sepp Blatter was accused and subsequently charged with fraud. The memory of comedian Simon Brodkin showering the sport’s top man with fake money is unfortunately the lasting image of the legacy that Infantino has inherited. No matter what FIFA or UEFA do, their decisions will be analysed to the nth degree, and the Club World Cup is no exception. If successful, it could be the first step in FIFA’s long journey to restoring its reputation.

On the surface, the Club World Cup seems nothing more than another thinly veiled attempt to increase the number of matches across the season and boost revenue, but the promises behind the project are encouraging. FIFA projects an eye-watering revenue of $2 billion, with half of that coming from a global broadcast rights agreement with DAZN, and claims that the competition will be entirely self-sufficient. Any profits from the Cup will be reinvested into club football projects worldwide, which is what we have all been crying out for. Giving lesser teams the opportunity to earn big money will go some way to closing the gap between the rich and the poor in football.

I still take issue, however, with the allocation of these funds. $575 million will be shared across the 32 teams who compete, with $465 million being split depending on sporting performance. What we’ll indubitably see is the richest European sides winning and taking home most of the pot. If the aim of the competition is to redistribute football’s riches, why not give more winnings to the less affluent teams for whom the money would be far more valuable? For context, Botafogo won their first-ever Copa Libertadores last year, with a wage bill of under £350,000. In the same time frame, Manchester City paid Erling Haaland £500,000. It seems therefore nonsensical to have a progression-based reward system — I would scrap the prize pool and give each competing team a portion of the money depending on the continent they represent. Doing this would ensure that teams from South America, Asia, and Africa are guaranteed to take home the majority of the earnings as the mission statement suggests should happen. The notion that this change is solely to promote lower-league football is being frustratingly undermined by the way in which FIFA are allocating their funds.

The only apparent justification for the current plan is to give the bigger teams sufficient reason to pay heed to the Club World Cup, because FIFA knows that no one will watch a tournament of this nature without the presence of the best players in the world. Having to throw money at Europe’s elite for them to even bother fielding a side would suggest that the problem lies not in the finances but in the prestige of the competition. Most fans could not tell you who won the Club World Cup last year, yet everyone knows that Real Madrid are the holders of the Champions League. The only way to make the Club World Cup as desirable as the pre-existing competitions is to raise the overall level of the competition, which would best be done via direct investment.

It remains to be seen how the Club World Cup will unfold this year, but it seems unlikely that it will be a hit. With the news coverage around the competition having been overwhelmingly negative, FIFA have failed to control their own narrative, which was supposed to increase the audience in coming years. If this was an attempt to win back the fans, I’m afraid it’s back to the drawing board.

Image from Wikimedia Commons