FIFA gave its 32 competing teams a billion reasons to take a revamped Club World Cup seriously when announcing its monstrous prize pot back in March.
Each and every club had appetites sharpened by the announcement of a $1billion fund in March, with the lucky winner potentially walking away with up to $125million for less than a month’s work.
The short-term gains have been there for all to see — $2m just for a group game win — yet it is the intangibles, a promise of commercial growth in a largely untapped market, that also ensures no participating club is dismissive of the opportunity presenting itself in the United States.
The empty seats at many stadiums, and patchy quality of the football, may have sparked some barbed comments in more established football territories, but to the clubs involved, this is a brand-building moment and a chance to either entrench positions in the market or to spark growth.
The European Club Association, which has 11 of its members playing in the U.S., are among those who champion the positives that jar with the ongoing workload concerns of players’ unions.
“The ECA has been supportive of this tournament from the beginning,” said the organisation’s chairman, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, also president of Paris Saint-Germain — one of the competing teams — on the eve of the tournament in Miami. “We believe that the FIFA Club World Cup will become a landmark competition and can deliver real benefits for all clubs.”
Some Club World Cup games have attracted small crowds (David Ramos/Getty Images)
Or, in other words, the chance to swell their coffers.
Strip it all back and the Club World Cup in its latest iteration is another money-making exercise for its most high-profile participants. A pre-season tour gilded and rebadged; an introduction to new audiences with cheques banked along the way.
FIFA has issued soundbites from players and managers talking up the chance to create history by lifting silverware, but executives will inevitably be viewing it through a different prism for now. One where balance sheets build and their brand finds ballast.
“I know first-hand that the clubs competing in the Club World Cup are hugely supportive of it. They see it as a major opportunity,” Phil Carling, head of football at the marketing agency Octagon and formerly the Football Association’s commercial director, tells The Athletic.
“It probably goes back for the last 10 years, but at the moment, the scramble to capture, retain and, ideally, monetise international fans is particularly fierce.
“Any platform, like the Club World Cup, that gives you exposure in the right prestigious environment — and even better if you win it — is your opportunity to capture those fans and use that as an equity to build wealth through your commercial programmes.
“Talent follows money, eyeballs follow talent, and money follows eyeballs. Put that together and it helps to understand the commercial model for elite sport.”
The revamped Club World Cup, spanning close to a month, is that new chance for clubs to sell themselves. It might lack the prestige and rewards of UEFA’s Champions League, but FIFA’s summertime competition has the potential to bring layered financial hits. Merchandise can be sold and social media followers gained on the back of exploits in the U.S.
“We can take a sniffy view of this because of long-held legacy attitudes about football and what is valuable in football,” explains Tim Crow, an experienced sports marketing advisor.
“But there’s a new generation of fans to be won and that’s really the key battleground. It’s not about whether the traditional fan is won over, it’s a question of whether new fans are won over.”
Commercial revenue is the income stream where clubs are most emphatically the masters of their own destiny, and in the modern era, it continues to take on huge significance.
Deloitte’s annual Money League report, a ranking of the richest clubs in football, found that its top 20 generated £4.2bn of commercial income in 2023-24, which amounted to 44 per cent of the collective turnover. Of the top 10 clubs, only Arsenal had commercial revenues that were eclipsed by either broadcast or matchday income.
At football’s capitalist edge, the scramble is on to secure international fans with money to spend. It is why Manchester United will head to New Jersey, Chicago and Atlanta next month after a post-season trip to the Far East. Arsenal have their own preparatory plans in Singapore and Hong Kong, while Liverpool and Barcelona are both travelling to Japan, among other countries.
The suspicion is that Ruben Amorim, Mikel Arteta, Arne Slot and Hansi Flick will all be glad of the rest currently being afforded to their players, but the commercial departments of those teams tasked with raising profiles and enhancing brands and with targets to meet, will quietly be lamenting not being part of the Club World Cup.
Manchester United visited Hong Kong in May (Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images)
“All of the big Premier League clubs not part of this will be wishing they were,” says Carling, who previously headed up Arsenal’s first commercial team in the 1990s. “There wouldn’t be a board that got a call from FIFA to step in six months ago who would turn it down. They would’ve hired a rowing boat to get over the Atlantic.
“The prize money is one thing, but the prestige and where it positions you as a club, as an entity within world football, is very important. I doubt the players and coaching staff will be weeping that they’re not involved, but being part of this is huge for the clubs that are going.”
PSG’s Al-Khelaifi is not the only prominent figure pleased to be spending much of the footballing summer in the U.S.
Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano said his club was “very excited” to be one of the 32 involved. “I think it’s something that was very much needed,” he told reporters this week following their opening game against Wydad AC in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Real Madrid’s Florentino Perez was even more ebullient. “It’s a beautiful competition and I’m sure it will be a huge success,” he told DAZN. “We’ve come here with great enthusiasm.”
The comments have the feel of people at a party telling those stuck at home of the fun they are missing, but there is substance to the propaganda.
Every elite club remains locked in a battle to grow its brand and the bigger that gets, the more revenues can be generated. Real Madrid, Europe’s most successful club, are widely considered to have built the strongest brand in football and in 2023-24, that was reflected in commercial revenues of £410m.
“There are three angles on how clubs can grow their brand (through the Club World Cup),” says Hugo Hensley, head of sports services at Brand Finance.
“One is global. You’re going to have global exposure. But that really matters for the big brands that actually can monetise that rate, clubs like Real Madrid. They need to have that to maintain the prestige as being the best in the world.
“There’s also local exposure. It’s going to be brilliant for the Middle Eastern club who can say we’re on this really prestigious stage and build engagement locally.
“And then there’s exposure to the U.S. You get that very valuable market that all of these brands are hoping will be monetisable either now, or as a long-term brand growth prospect.”
The location of this Club World Cup, played out over 11 host cities in the U.S., has undeniably added appeal to its participants. There might be huge numbers of locals who care little for its presence this summer, but the biggest European clubs concluded long ago that it was the market with the greatest potential to tap.
There are, literally, millions without footballing club loyalties. FIFA ran a quiz on their website earlier this week underlining as much, inviting users to answer a series of questions that would help determine the club they should be backing at the tournament.
“If you asked most Premier League clubs to list the top three markets they’d like FIFA to take this to, the U.S. would certainly be in there,” says Crow.
“It’s a giant economy. Forty cents in every dollar spent on sports marketing around the world emanates from the U.S. It makes a lot of sense to go there and try to tap into that engine. For big European clubs, they have been steadily working away at the American market for a long time.”
Manchester City are in the U.S. to win games and new fans (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
Carling is in agreement.
“It is a $20trillion market and the richest domestic market in the world,” he says. “Therefore, the consumers might be smaller in number, but their economic weight is much heavier than, say, India or China, where clubs used to feel they should be targeting.
“The pivot towards the U.S. is becoming very important in a lot of clubs’ strategies. There are fans in the States who haven’t made up their minds on who they should follow and here’s an opportunity to capture those fans. And economically significant fans. You’ll have those people then potentially going out to buy merchandise, follow the team in the future and subscribe to digital channels. More importantly, they’ll be interested in brands that are associated with those clubs.”
The Club World Cup remains a tournament of unknowns as the group stages reach their deciding moments in the coming days. No one, not even FIFA president Gianni Infantino, can predict where his pet project will be 10 years from now and whether it has confounded the scepticism.
Will winning the final in New Jersey on July 13 really count for much beyond the windfall awaiting the victors? Only time will tell, but there is a reason that Manchester City, Real Madrid, PSG and more are all desperate to find out.
This Club World Cup, for all its detractors, is a big step towards more.
(Top photo: Leonie Asendorpf/picture alliance via Getty Images)
