FIFA scrambling together 2025 Club World Cup, a grand venture riddled with uncertainty

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 notable fanfare earlier this month.

But the novel 32-team tournament, which FIFA conceived to reshape club soccer, does not yet have broadcasters or sponsors. With the opener less than nine months away, it does not have stadiums to stage games. It does not have tickets on sale. It has not publicized dates for any of these announcements.

FIFA is deep in discussions with potential venues, most of them on the U.S. east coast, multiple sources briefed on the talks told Yahoo Sports. But another problem is that it apparently does not yet have prestigious European clubs fully onboard.

And the uncertainty, as always, is mostly related to money.

The European clubs, according to reports and a source familiar with the situation, want UEFA Champions League-level payouts as compensation for their participation. (Real Madrid, for example, could make over $100 million in a single year under UEFA’s new Champions League prize money scheme.)

But FIFA has struggled to sell TV and commercial rights to the unproven Club World Cup — so, presumably, it is hesitant to guarantee such huge payouts.

Players have also voiced concerns about their ever-growing workload. Unions are taking legal action against FIFA, with this new, expanded Club World Cup as the “tipping point.” Some have suggested that strikes are possible, or even “close,” as Manchester City midfielder Rodri said this week.

With enthusiasm low, and controversy brewing, and the soccer calendar oversaturated — and with popular clubs such as Barcelona, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal uninvolved in the 2025 tournament — major TV networks and multinational companies have reportedly valued the competition well below FIFA’s asking prices.

So FIFA, it seems, is getting desperate. The Athletic reported Thursday that FIFA president Gianni Infantino, the all-powerful mastermind and driver behind this Club World Cup, called a Friday meeting with broadcast executives from around the world to drum up interest.

FIFA also quietly changed the tournament’s name, from “Mundial de Clubes FIFA” to “FIFA Club World Cup.”

It announced that Italian singer Gala’s “Freed from Desire” would be the tournament’s “audio signature” — as opposed to just a popular song that is played at countless soccer and European sporting events, including relentlessly at the Paris Olympics this past summer.

It touted the new logo, and social media posts from qualified clubs, as evidence that they were all committed.

The clubs, publicly, have indeed stated their commitment. “Our club will take part,” Real Madrid said in a June statement after head coach Carlo Ancelotti claimed in an interview that Madrid and others would “refuse the invitation” for economic reasons. Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who chairs the European Clubs 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.

But negotiations are ongoing, and details unknown. One source suggested to Yahoo Sports that October meetings around the General Assembly of the ECA, an umbrella group that represents the interests of a wide range of European clubs, would be key to getting financial agreements ironed out.

FIFA’s Club World Cup struggles for funding

Finances have 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 soccer governing body whose annual revenues outstrip those of FIFA, the global governing body.

But to launch a competition that would challenge UEFA’s Champions League — a World Cup-style, quadrennial tournament with broad appeal and a grand feel — Infantino always needed funding. It’s currently unclear what the sources of that funding will be.

Years ago, there were reports that an international consortium of investors, led by Japan’s then-richest man, would bankroll the tournament with billions of dollars. But that deal met resistance and never materialized.

More recently, earlier this year, Apple and FIFA reportedly neared an agreement for global broadcast rights. But that, too, fell through — perhaps because handing exclusive rights to a paywalled streaming service would limit the Club World Cup’s reach and attractiveness to sponsors.

So FIFA opened up the bidding for broadcast rights in July and August. In the meantime, over the past month-plus, it has announced two new 2026 World Cup sponsors, Bank of America and Lay’s — but neither announcement mentioned the 2025 Club World Cup.

And in U.S. cities that have committed to organizing the 2026 World Cup, there is nowhere near the same level of engagement nor support for the 2025 Club World Cup — because it brings nowhere near the same level of notoriety 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 eschewed, leaving the Club World Cup as less of a spectacle.

FIFA’s options, then, are diminishing. It could settle for whatever it can milk out of sponsors and broadcasters. It could plead with a friendly entity in a petrostate (Saudi Arabia?) to underwrite the tournament. Or, it could accept that this first edition of the expanded Club World Cup won’t be the bonanza initially promised, and essentially pay out of pocket to get the concept off the ground, with a view toward commercial success in 2029 and beyond.

Overloaded players hint at possible strike

All of this uncertainty could weaken the tournament. The tournament should still happen, though, unless players take collective action.

“If something is going to change, it must come from the players,” Man City coach Pep Guardiola said Friday.

Coaches and players have consistently bemoaned the buildup of matches in recent years. But 2024 has heightened their urgency, and changed the tenor of conversations. Many played the 2023-24 season in full, then spent a month with their national teams at the Euros or Copa América. Then, after truncated offseasons — many got less than a month of vacation — they delved back into club seasons, which, in addition to domestic leagues and cups, and globetrotting preseason tours, and international windows, now include two or four extra Champions League games.

And then, tacked on to the end of all that, is the Club World Cup, which is scheduled to begin June 15 and end July 13 — after many clubs have begun their preseasons for the 2025-26 campaign … which will be followed by an expanded World Cup that ends July 19, 2026.

“It seems that if everything goes ahead, we won’t have time off for a few years,” Atlético Madrid and Argentina midfielder Rodrigo De Paul said this week. “I think it’s something that needs to be analyzed. We are human beings, and in the end, everyone needs time to recover.”

“If it keeps this way,” Man City’s Rodri said, “it will be a moment that we’ll have no other option [but to strike].

“But let’s see. I don’t know,” he concluded. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen. But it’s something that worry us — because we are the guys that suffer.”