REVEALED: team-by-team cash at FIFA's Club World Cup, plus tournament forecast
Football's world governing body has released details of the huge cash on offer for the 32 clubs playing in the new Club World Cup this summer ... and it's far from equal.
FIFA last week announced details of prize money for this summer’s Club World Cup (CWC), an event to be played in major venues in the USA from 14 June to 13 July, and already much derided in some quarters.
Players (here and here), coaches (here, here and here), welfare unions, fan organisations and human rights groups are among those who have already been critical but we’ll come back to that.
The headline figures from the FIFA press release on the cash available to the 32 clubs are:
A $1 billion prize fund (£773m/€924m) to be split between the participating clubs, although far from equally.
Top potential earnings per club (for a maximum of a month’s work) of $125m (£97m/€116m). The lowest potential earnings are $3.58m.
A nebulous “target of an additional $250m being provided to club football across the world. This solidarity will undoubtedly provide a significant boost in our ongoing efforts in making football truly global.” Why only a target? Who will get this money? There are no answers yet.
The $1bn prize fund is broken down into $525m for the 32 clubs merely for participating, plus $475m depending or “sporting performance.” But the disparity between which clubs will get what - depending on what part of the world they come from - is shocking.
The full numbers per club, in detail, will follow later in the piece.
Although 12 of the 32 competing clubs (38% of them) come from Europe, they will receive 58% of the participation cash between them, and in all likelihood just over 70% of the total cash available.
It’s almost as if FIFA has had to bribe some of the biggest names in European club football, and some of the smaller names, to attend an extra event that will make demands on already overworked players, probably in half-empty stadiums.
Eleven of the 32 clubs (34%) will come from South America and the Concacaf region combined, but will receive 27% of the participation cash between them and probably around 20% of all the total cash available.
Nine of the 32 clubs (28%) will come from Africa, Asia or Oceania combined but will receive 15% of the participation cash between them and around 10% of the total cash on offer.
Is FIFA racist? Regionalist? Pragmatic? Driven by ulterior motives aside from genuine growth of the game globally?
When FIFA first announced this summer’s tournament - in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in December 2023, as FIFA president Gianni Infantino intensified his love-in with the Saudi regime - Infantino talked about giving clubs around the world an equal opportunity to play at this level. And last week Infantino said “the distribution model of the FIFA Club World Cup reflects the pinnacle of club football.”
The problem with those statements is that some clubs are getting a lot more than others simply for showing up. Your pinnacle is much lower if you’re from Oceania, or Africa, or Asia.
The 12 European clubs, for example, are getting between $12.81m and $38.19m each just for attending - “Determined by an [undeclared] ranking based on sporting and commercial criteria,” said FIFA - while at the other end of the scale, Auckland City are getting $3.58m.
As for the wider effects of giving away $1bn at one tournament to 32 clubs from the world’s 4,400 professional clubs, the consequences will only be seen in the years after this event.
Mamelodi Sundowns of South Africa will be at the Club World Cup this summer, for example. They currently have a 15-point lead at the top of South Africa’s top division. They won their nation’s top-tier title last season. And the season before. And the season before. And the season before. And the season before. And the season before. And the season before.
Their annual revenue according to their latest accounts was $6.9m. FIFA will pay them $9.55m just for turning up in the USA for the CWC, helping massively to skew the football economics in the Sundowns’ favour in their country. If the Sundowns get through the group stage - which OPTA world rankings suggest they might - they could make the thick end of $23m from the CWC.
To varying degrees, from Auckland to Riyadh to Salzburg to Munich to Madrid to Paris and many other cities who will send clubs to the CWC this summer, FIFA’s wads of cash will help distort national leagues, hugely, for years.
UEFA’s revamped Champions League is doing the same across Europe as I detailed last month in a piece using UEFA’s own figures.
Anyway, here is the FIFA breakdown of the participation cash available this summer at the CWC. We’ll get to team-by-team cash shortly.
And below is the breakdown of extra money depending on sporting performance. The sums for each round are in addition to the money earned in earlier rounds, so there is $87.625m available in sporting performance pay alone for the winner; and just $10m less for the runner-up; and so on.
Before we move onto the calculations that show precisely how much each club could earn this summer, depending on how deep they progress, I’ll recap a few of the controversies that have already flared since FIFA announced their Make-It-Up-As-You-Go-Along CWC.