Club World Cup 'lacks stars & some of the world's most popular teams... and jeopardy'
FIFA president Gianni Infantino's pet project finally gets underway on Saturday, with $1bn prize cash at stake, funded by Saudi Arabia. But will it be a spectacle, or flop?
FIFA’s inaugural 32-team Club World Cup kicks off on Saturday in the wake of a warning that it faces three challenges in delivering a) quality; b) jeopardy and c) emotional engagement for a wide audience - all vital to a successful sporting event.
Bringing the new tournament to realisation has become a personal mission of FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who has insisted it will help develop football and provide new opportunities for a greater diversity of clubs from around the world.
Critics - this site included - believe the motivation is more political (FIFA chipping away at UEFA), and financial, adding a major club event to an already crowded calendar, in a dash for cash to tempt big clubs to take part - using someone else’s money rather than FIFA’s.
Hence a $1bn TV deal for DAZN to show all the games live (and provide a $1bn prize fund) was actually in effect funded by Saudi Arabia, on the face of it a quid pro quo for Saudi Arabia being handed hosting rights for the 2034 men’s World Cup in a manner that remains oblique.
Last week it was also announced that FIFA had entered a new commercial partnership with the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund chaired by Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and accused of heading a regime responsible for human rights abuses, murder and policies that discriminate against women and the gay community.
And yet: FIFA want money, Saudi Arabia have money and the show goes on.
The CWC kicks off on Saturday evening in Miami when Inter Miami, and their star man Lionel Messi (below) play Al Ahly of Egypt at the Hard Rock Stadium.
Fixtures on Sunday include Palmeiras versus Porto, Paris Saint-German against Atletico Madrid, and Botafogo of Brazil versus Seattle Sounders of MLS. As we detailed in April, the tournament winners could pocket more than $125m in prize money.
Another game on Sunday sees Bayern Munich, ranked between No2 and No8 in the world depending on the system used - whether you use OPTA, the EuroClubIndex ranking from Gracenote, the Football Database rankings, or the Football Club ELO rankings - play Auckland City of New Zealand, ranked No4951 in the world.
This is a colossal mismatch, with Bayern Munich priced at 1-50 to win the game, and that will likely be closer to 1-100 by kick-off, with Auckland priced at almost 100-1.
Auckland’s players are amateurs, most of them with nine-to-five day jobs, such as centre-half Adam Mitchell, an estate agent. Auckland’s other players include a window cleaner, a truck driver, a PE teacher, a lawyer, and a brewery worker, while their manager, Paul Posa, is a dentist.
The warning report about lack of quality and jeopardy at this summer’s CWC came in a report from the sports intelligence agency, Twenty First Group, which supports sporting organisations in strategic decision-making and storytelling. You can subscribe to regular short insights from them here.
The firm has worked with football clubs to help them punch above their weight in the transfer market, and with event organisers to boost profile and competitive balance, and their sister company assisted the European Ryder Cup team to victory via analytics support in 2018. You can read about that on pages 36-39 of the GSSS 2018 report.
Omar Chaudhuri, who will be familiar to many Sporting Intelligence readers as a contributor to various GSSS reports and to this site, is 21st Group’s chief intelligence officer, and he says the CWC has a number of “product problems”, namely quality, jeopardy and emotional connection.
“Just 50 of the world's top 100 players will feature in the tournament,’ he says. “That’s compared to a benchmark of 72 at the 2022 World Cup. Moreover, three of the world's four best teams currently did not qualify.”
This is a reference to the trio of Liverpool, Arsenal and Barcelona, who all ride high within all the ranking systems.
In terms of jeopardy, Chaudhuri says that one in four of the group matches at this CWC “will have a favourite with an 80% chance of winning, something which doesn't happen at the World Cup. Meanwhile, there is more than a 95% chance of a European winner.”
He added: “Growing and professionalising football globally - thereby reducing the sport's Euro-centrism - would in the long term improve the event in these areas, though the prize money distributions may hinder rather than advance this ambition.”
The 2025 CWC prize money is skewed so that European teams get the most, as we detailed back in April in the piece linked above.
Chaudhuri’s third concern is that some of the world’s most popular - and indeed best - clubs will be absent, including three of the world's seven most followed clubs on social media: Barcelona, Manchester United and Liverpool.
We’ll return to this in a moment but another report this week, from the CIES Football Observatory, produced a new list of the world’s 100 most popular football clubs by social media followings. Here are the top seven:
Neutrals are more likely to tune in when “big clubs” are playing but there are underwhelming matches for a general fan across all the groups, whether that’s Botafogo v Seattle, or Los Angeles FC v ES Tunis, or Urawa Red Diamonds v Monterrey, or Al-Ahli v Colo-Colo, or Ulsan HD v Mamelodi Sundowns, or Al Ain v Wydad AC. And on and on.
Actually one of those fixtures is entirely made up, featuring two teams who aren’t even competing. Do you know or even care which one it is?
That CIES report is interesting because it shows not just the extraordinary reach of the biggest clubs in the world - and it’s no coincidence they are also the richest - but how important social media has become to club-fan engagement.
The rest of today’s piece will take a time machine back to 2010 and look at what global sport’s social media landscape looked like in its infancy; and then to 2019 to show how football had really taken control of the genre, relatively speaking; and I’ll also look at the social media numbers for other major (non-football) leagues around the world, from cricket to the NBA, NFL and more.