Yes, the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup has come with complications.
There was the late removal of CF Pachuca based on FIFA’s restriction against multiple entrants with the same ownership, and the haphazard feel of the playoff between LAFC and Club América to re-decide the vacated spot.
There was pushback from European clubs protesting an extension of their season, and more recently, concern over lagging ticket sales.
And yet, once play begins on Saturday night, no one should be surprised if the 32-team event ultimately becomes a huge hit.
If anything, all the uncertainty is actually pretty normal in a history of the world game that is rife with success stories regarding competitions that began amid plenty of doubt.
After all, the first World Cup in 1930 in Uruguay could only muster a field of 13 entrants—and just four from Europe because of the difficulty of Depression-era travel.
Twenty-five years later, the first European Cup (now the UEFA Champions League) began without reigning English league champions Chelsea because leadership of the Football League believed continental competition was bad for its clubs and the sport.
It’s impossible to imagine soccer without either competition today. The Champions League final is the most-watched annual sporting event on earth, and viewership totals for the quadrennial World Cup final can land north of 1 billion.
And while the new quadrennial Club World Cup is unproven by comparison, it also combines arguably the best elements of both those competitions, matching the highest level of play on the planet with the most compelling format.
National team competition is by its nature tactically imbalanced—you can’t just buy players to fill a positional void—and therefore more blunt from a stylistic standpoint than the top levels of club play.
But what is most captivating about the World Cup and other national team tournaments is the rhythm of the events: the initial curiosity of the early group games, the final drama of the simultaneous group matches on Matchday 3, and then the increasingly higher stakes through the knockout stages.
It allows neutrals enough time to fall in love with new players and teams without exhausting their attention spans over an entire season. And now neutrals will get that opportunity with clubs from all over the world.
To be fair, a lot will depend ultimately on how seriously the giants of the tournament take the event, and whether the minnows can pull off compelling upsets anyway.
With regards to the former, the possibility to earn significant prize money—upward of $125 million for the winning club—will be a very real motivator.
As for the latter, the format of eight four-team groups is friendlier to lesser-fancied teams than the old annual Club World Cup format that was played as a single-elimination bracket. Whoever faced the European or South American champions in the end did so as their second match in a short period, while their opponent had a first-round bye.
Nothing is certain in sports. And the issues that have plagued the new event are real and worthy of concern. But sometimes the organic spectacle of competition takes over. Let’s hope that’s what happens over the next month.
