In early March, a week after Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky’s slanging match seized international headlines, FIFA arrived at the White House for some theatrics of its own.
Gianni Infantino, the governing body’s president—or the “King of Soccer”, as Trump crowned him—had gathered journalists in the Oval Office to promote the radical expansion of FIFA's flagship club competition, the Club World Cup. That, and to showcase the new trophy, which was hidden beneath a black cloak. This month, over the course of four weeks in cities across the United States, 32 leading football teams from around the globe will compete against each other for the honour of lifting it—and take their share of a USD1 billion prize pool, one of the largest in sports history. This was the second-to-last stop on a three-month promo tour, and by far the most important.
After a brief Q&A session, undercut by questions from the press about Elon Musk, the FIFA chief pulled at the shroud to reveal a gleaming gold plate on a bulky stand. Trump stared impassively. It was round and flat like a coin but as wide and tall as a car tyre, covered in cosmic patterns and indecipherable blocks of text. It looked heavy. It did not look particularly liftable.
“But it’s not finished,” Infantino said, holding up a large gold key. He plugged it into the back and turned it, causing the trophy to splay out into a series of criss-crossing rings. It resembled an armillary sphere, the kind of arcane device ancient astronomers used to chart the stars. “It represents the past, the future…” he continued. “Everything.”
The new Club World Cup, which kicks off on 14 June at the Hard Rock Stadium in Florida, with a match between Egyptian side Al Ahly and Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami, also represents FIFA's third attempt at a competition that, over the last 30 or so years, has been greeted by a curious mix of scorn, ridicule and utter indifference. It is yet another set of fixtures on top of an ever-increasing playing schedule that footballers say is pushing their bodies to the limit. But more than anything, it is a transatlantic power grab that poses big questions about the game’s future—and who gets to decide what happens next.
If you want to get an idea of FIFA's ambitions for the tournament, just take a closer look at those inscriptions.
Made in collaboration with New York jeweller Tiffany & Co, the trophy is plated in 24-carat gold. One of the laser engravings charts the position of the solar system on the day of the opening match. Space has been allocated for the crests of the next century’s worth of winners. Gianni Infantino’s name is also written on the trophy—twice—alongside a mission statement: “We are witness to a new age. The golden era of club football: the era of the FIFA Club World Cup.”
Broadly speaking, the football world does not share FIFA's enthusiasm.
For well over a decade, the Club World Cup has been treated as something of an after- thought by European teams—and tolerated as a lucrative distraction by their fans. Held most Decembers in the Middle East, it featured five clubs from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas (each of which had won their own regional competition), who would duke it out in the knockout rounds in order to face two European and South American teams parachuted in at the semi-final stage. The long-haul travel was inconvenient; the prize money—around USD5 million for the winners—was not.
But that all changed in 2018, when FIFA presented plans for a supersized Club World Cup during a hastily arranged council meeting.
FIFA wanted to quadruple the number of teams. The parachutes had been punctured, and everyone—even the pampered European giants—would start off on an equal footing. It would no longer take place over the festive period, but every four years in the summer, interrupting domestic campaigns, pre-season build-ups and crucial recovery periods in a sport that already allows far less time off—for players and fans—than the likes of basketball and American football. Any relief that came from the new cadence was dented by the fact that FIFA would also be holding a six-team Intercontinental Cup in the years between tournaments, in a bid to “stimulate competitiveness”.
After a year of bad-tempered back and forth between Infantino and rebelling European officials—more on that later—FIFA forged ahead with the plan. At this summer’s Club World Cup, the likes of Manchester City, Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich—the aristocrats of European football—will spend four weeks lining up against teams from five different continents, including Auckland City FC from New Zealand, Espérance of Tunisia, and Al Ain from Abu Dhabi. They do so with varying degrees of reluctance.
For years, players, managers and league chiefs have loudly objected to the revamp. In October 2024, sensing they were getting nowhere, the global players’ union Fifpro finally filed a legal complaint with the European Commission against FIFA for its abrupt changes to the global match calendar, which they claim were completed without proper consultation with the overworked athletes who will suffer under its weight.
The argument is simple: too much is being asked of modern footballers.
Players’ calendars have grown so demanding that, according to Fifpro, 24-year-old Brazilian phenom Vinicius Júnior of Real Madrid has already played more than twice as many matches as Ronaldinho had at the same age. By the end of 2024, Argentina and Atlético de Madrid forward Julián Alvarez played 70 matches across the year for club and country, clocking up 175 hours of international travel. Both are set to play at the Club World Cup.
Top clubs embark on pre-season tours around the world to build on foreign fanbases. That’s on top of upscaling leagues and cups, both domestic and international. In the past few years, we’ve seen expansions to the Champions League and the World Cup, as well as the introduction of the Nations League. The situation, according to players and coaches, is spiralling out of control.
In September 2024, the Spanish Ballon d’Or winner Rodri became the first superstar name to speak out about the congested match calendar’s heavy toll, mere weeks before he suffered a season-ending ACL injury. It sparked a wave of solidarity across European football.
Arsenal defender Jurrien Timber called the current model “dangerous” and a “big topic” in the dressing room. “The calendar doesn’t make any sense,” lamented the Real Madrid midfielder Dani Carvajal in a press conference last year, saying: “It’s impossible to perform at your best. We and our families suffer as a result.” The Manchester City star Phil Foden opened up about the mental and physical burnout that came from performing in 69 matches for club and England last season. In March, England captain Harry Kane remarked that top level footballers aren't "listened to that much" when it comes to playing schedules. Rodri has warned that players are “close to” going on strike.
"Right now, I don’t think the players and the managers actually want to be there," said former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher, talking to The Athletic in April. "That’s a really sad state of affairs for a new tournament. When do they ever get a rest? So we’re talking now about players who will only get a rest one summer every four years."
For decades, footballers have been sweepingly dismissed as overpaid prima donnas. It’s not a wholly unfair assessment. But it says something about the unyielding pace and scale of the modern game that these coddled millionaires are increasingly on the receiving end of concern from fans.
If you ask Darren Burgess, a high-performance manager at Adelaide Football Club, who previously held senior conditioning roles at Liverpool and Arsenal, the protection of players’ health and wellbeing isn’t just a matter of basic empathy—it’s about getting value for money, too.
“Expanded travel and fixture congestion both lead to injuries, that’s undisputed,” says Burgess, listing the ever-worsening factors—compromised sleep, shifting time zones, increased workload—that can put a player in the dreaded “red zone”. That’s the point at which they’re at serious risk of muscular injury. Then there are the considerable strains on mental health. “Fans are seeing their favourite players miss seasons and get injured, and they have compassion. Why wouldn’t they? They want the best product.” He says it “feels like there’s a tipping point coming”.
Football’s stakeholders, including club owners and investors, want to sweat their assets. But in a world of fast-rising ticket prices and TV packages, it’s not just the spectacle that suffers.
Towards the end of 2024, Howden’s Football Injury Index found that injuries suffered by male players in European leagues had risen in frequency by four per cent over four years. More worryingly, it found that far more players under the age of 21 were suffering “severe” injuries that sidelined them for more than a month—up 187 per cent across the same period.
Even before the football calendar began to swell up like a nasty ankle sprain, widespread misuse of painkillers has been an issue. Former Liverpool defender Daniel Agger retired at the age of 31, when he collapsed after a match in 2016 due, in large part, to an overreliance on analgesics and coffee. “I have taken too much anti-inflammatories in my career,” he said at the time. “I know that full well, and it sucks.” Former Tottenham player Dele Alli has said that sleeping pills are also “something going around more than people realise in football”.
Jiri Dvorak, FIFA's former chief medical officer, who was let go from the organisation while investigating alleged Russian doping, told the BBC he believed that modern players were far too reliant on anti-inflammatories. “It has become a cultural issue, part of the game,” said Dvorak. “It is absolutely wrong. For me it’s clearly abuse of the drugs—that’s why we use the word alarming.”
All of these problems are compounded by the fact that competitions are increasingly taking place in continents with shifting time zones and extreme weather environments. “[Change in climate] has a massive impact on injury rates and performance,” Burgess tells me. “That shouldn’t be understated.”
Nevertheless, the schedule grows and the air miles rack up. Next year’s FIFA World Cup, taking place across the US, Canada and Mexico, will raise the number of competing teams from 32 to 48. By 2030, when the World Cup travels around South America, FIFA reportedly plans to expand it to 64. Infantino recently pitched the idea of hosting a World Cup every two years, but was shot down.
FIFA's top brass would no doubt argue that it’s all in service to the governing body’s founding principle: to make football, in Infantino’s words, “truly global”. They say that it’s not about hoarding wealth but building and distributing it fairly—particularly to poor nations that haven’t profited from the cash cow that is club football.
The new Club World Cup is a fundamental part of that grand plan. And it’s one that FIFA has been chipping away at for a long time.
One summer’s day in 1999, a few weeks before the start of the new English Premier League season, reporter Jeremy Armstrong cleared his schedule, placed a phone to his ear and started dialling. Manchester United had just announced that they would be pulling out of the FA Cup in favour of FIFA's inaugural club competition in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and his editor at The Daily Mirror wanted celebrities to chime in on the nation-shaking news.
The Club World Championship, as it was then called, was to be played across nine days in January, causing an insurmountable fixture pile-up. The prize money stood at around EUR3.7 million, almost quadruple that of the FA Cup. The subsequent front-page story—a fever dream of figures from British public life, ranging from Prime Minister Tony Blair to supermodel Caprice and Falklands hero Simon Weston, all sticking the boot into Alex Ferguson’s arrogant treble-winners—has since gone down in tabloid folklore.
The talking heads agreed that it was a grasping betrayal that threatened the game’s oldest competition. But one famous figure, who responded after the story’s deadline had passed, arguably had more sway than the rest.
“We rang the pope to see if he could save the FA Cup on our behalf,” Armstrong tells me, 26 years down the line. “Someone in the Vatican, who had a really good sense of humour, said, ‘I can give you our blessing.’”
The Catholic Church had spoken—though in fairness, it soon emerged that United held no desire for a sweltering South American odyssey, either. It was the Football Association that had pushed them to accept FIFA's invitation, hoping that it would curry favour and help England’s (failed) bid to host the World Cup in 2006.
In the end, whether it was down to divine intervention, jet lag or hubris, the club suffered an unexpected humiliation at the Club World Championship: one loss and a draw, against Brazil’s Vasco da Gama and Mexican underdogs Necaxa, sent them packing in the group stages.
“I did get the impression they were a little bit bewildered by it,” says Armstrong, who stayed in the same Rio de Janeiro hotel as Manchester United’s players. “The whole thing was a very curious experiment, I think.”
It was an experiment first floated by FIFA chiefs in the Eighties, before being given the green light by their newly elected president Sepp Blatter in 1998. The idea was simple: an annual knockout competition, held in a new country each year, consisting of eight teams from six confederations around the world who qualified via their respective continental cup competitions.
It all grew from FIFA's desire to build commercial opportunities, widen its influence and buy into club football’s skyrocketing stock. That, and to get the upper hand in a historic tussle with their European counterparts.
According to the recently translated memoir of Lennart Johansson, the late president of Uefa, his (extremely lucrative) decision to commercially rebrand the European Cup as the Champions League six years earlier went down badly in FIFA's Zurich HQ. “We immediately met strong opposition from Fifa and Sepp Blatter,” he writes, “who feared that Uefa would eventually become bigger than FIFA as a result.”
There was also some financial necessity to the Club World Championship, given the precarious state of FIFA's coffers as the 1990s drew to a close. Soon after the competition found its first winner—an all-Brazil final won by Corinthians—FIFA's marketing partner ISL collapsed, sparking a corruption scandal that nearly bankrupted the whole organisation.
Things were so bad that FIFA couldn’t even afford to host a follow-up to the Club World Championship, which had been earmarked for Spain. Interest was already low, from European fans, clubs and business partners, and the competition was kicked into the long grass before reemerging in 2005 at a significantly reduced scale, merging with Uefa’s Intercontinental Cup and eventually receiving a new name: the Club World Cup.
Sepp Blatter, now 89 years old and serving a six-year ban from football for breaches of the FIFA ethics code, has described the original competition as a mistake. And yet, when Gianni Infantino won the FIFA presidency in 2016, a revival of the format was near the top of his agenda. With each passing year, the pitch grew bigger, brasher and more controversial.
In April 2018 it all came to a head, writes James Montague in his book, Engulfed: How Saudi Arabia Bought Sport, and the World. At the emergency meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, Infantino told global football officials that he’d received a USD25 billion proposal from a third party for a 32-team Club World Cup. The deal encompassed three editions of the tournament, alongside rights to a new competitive global league for national teams. This came as a surprise, considering the existing Club World Cup was worth less than USD100 million. Who was behind the bid? He couldn’t say; a non-disclosure agreement had been signed. Other details were sparse, too—but everyone in the room would need to vote on the offer, there and then.
European football leaders refused and resisted for more than a year, but it was ultimately pushed through by the FIFA council. The pandemic and lockdowns stopped China from hosting the new and improved Club World Cup in 2021—but this month, Infantino will finally get his wish.
Not long after that meeting, the identities of the deep-pocketed strangers were partially revealed. While Japanese conglomerate SoftBank had fronted the bid, it turned out that the plan was funded by a consortium of investors from the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia—the latter providing a lot of the cash. None of this came as a surprise.
Since 2017, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF)—controlled by the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS)—has bet heavily on sport as part of a well-publicised modernising project, designed to attract business investment and tourism, wash away Saudi Arabia’s repressive image and diversify its economy.
Billions from the oil-rich Gulf state have been spent on box-office events, competitions and names, principally across golf, boxing, eSports and football. Like their royal counterparts across the Middle East, the Saudis have led consortiums to buy top clubs around the world, too. In Europe, the most prominent examples are Manchester City (UAE), Newcastle United (PIF) and Paris Saint-Germain (Qatar).
Meanwhile, 10 clubs in the Premier League are fully or partially owned by American owners, including Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United. They are all determined to capitalise on the global appeal of their expensively purchased brands, preferably outside of Uefa’s stranglehold.
It is an upheaval of European hegemony that benefits FIFA and Gianni Infantino.
“He’s a guy who understands how power works and how to ingratiate himself to it shamelessly,” says Engulfed author James Montague. “One of the ways to concentrate power at FIFA is to ask: ‘What do you do about the Uefa Champions League?’”
Peculiarly for an organisation headquartered in Zurich and led by a succession of Swiss administrators, Montague says FIFA often resorts to anti-imperialist, anti-Western rhetoric in its bid to consolidate influence with global federations.
“The idea [is] of a Europe that’s hoarded the wealth. ‘The reason why your leagues are failing is because all your players want to go to Europe straight away. Their success makes it impossible for your local league, for your African Champions League or your Copa Libertadores to be successful and thrive’,” he says. “FIFA has zeroed in on that resentment. That’s how [former president] João Havelange kept his power, and then how Blatter made his power.”
At the White House trophy unveiling in March, Donald Trump announced the introduction of a task force for what has been dubbed “the MAGA World Cup”—a logistical necessity, owing to fierce diplomatic and immigratory tensions with its co-hosts, Mexico and Canada. In the Oval Office, Infantino claimed that both competitions would deliver a combined economic impact of USD40 billion and the creation of 200,000 jobs for the US. Reports suggest that the 2029 edition of the Club World Cup could be held in America, too.
On this side of the pond, anticipation for the new Club World Cup is low to non-existent. And ticket sales have been extremely sluggish for many of the less starry matches. But the US fans who do go along will surely relish the opportunity to watch big European teams perform with some real stakes at play.
“Everybody comes to America for pre-season games. Stadiums are sold out, and they’re great,” says Tim Howard, the former US goalkeeper and the co-host of the podcast Unfiltered Soccer with his former national team and Everton teammate Landon Donovan. “But what the Club World Cup provides is an opportunity to see all of these clubs compete somewhere it actually means something.”
Needless to say, European teams stand to make a lot of money playing domestic matches abroad, like their counterparts in the NFL and NBA. The wheels are already in motion: La Liga bosses are planning to host a league game in Miami next season, and the Spanish Super Cup final has been played in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, since 2022.
“If Spurs and Arsenal came to New York, it would be sold out in five minutes,” says Donovan, who is a part-owner of Swansea City. “The challenge is, how much are players going to push back?” He admits that travelling long-haul in the middle of the season could have an impact on athletes’ wellbeing. “But I can promise that the owners—I would guess 95 per cent of them—would want to do it yesterday.”
As two American footballers who spent a considerable amount of time playing in Europe, Howard and Donovan are in a unique position to understand the tribal bond that local communities share with their clubs. Howard contrasts it with America’s attitude to professional sports leagues, where “we have this bandwidth to be able to support different teams”.
Still, he believes that some of the most passionate Premier League fans in the world live far beyond our shores—and it’s only fair that the game should open up to them, too.
“I know in the UK everything is so close and tight-knit, and you can only do it one way,” Howard says, “[but] some guys in Minnesota who support Tottenham aren’t going to do it the same way people in north London support Tottenham. It’s going to be different. There’s going to be a tailgate. We’re going to put our own little vibe on it. That’s a really good thing, culturally.”
Even if the tournament’s big games are a sell-out, the Club World Cup needs global eyeballs, too—and FIFA is doing everything it can to make that happen. In the opening match, Egyptian champions Al Ahly will face Inter Miami, the Major League Soccer (MLS) club founded by David Beckham and the billionaire Jorge Mas in 2018. The Floridian newcomers were handed the final North American spot despite not winning the MLS Cup, which was previously considered the fair route by US administrators. Critics have dismissed it as a barefaced attempt to sneak Messi into proceedings by any means necessary.
Meanwhile, during an unexpected interview with TikTok influencer IShowSpeed in May, Gianni Infantino revealed that he was in talks with Cristiano Ronaldo about playing in the Club World Cup, despite the fact that his team, Saudi Arabia's Al-Nassr FC, didn't qualify. An emergency ten-day transfer window, what FIFA calls an “exceptional registration window”, has been introduced for competing clubs who want to bolster their squads before the 10 June cut-off.
Clearly, the spectacle takes precedence. Given the indifferent reaction that the new Club World Cup has received from broadcasters and sponsors, FIFA needs all the help it can get.
For years, the governing body struggled to secure a TV deal. Before the global rights were acquired in December by the streaming platform Dazn for about USD1 billion—another deal that critics have linked to large investment from the Saudi wealth fund—ITV reportedly made a bid of £0 (the suggestion being: “You need us more than we need you”). Channel 5 eventually agreed to show fewer than half the matches, and all 63 will be available to watch on Dazn for free.
And yet, despite all this, the prize pool is huge—to the point that Claudius Schäfer, the president of the European Leagues, says he “fears for the future” of domestic competitions because of the distortion it could cause. A pot of EUR780 million will be shared out among competing clubs—weighted by performance and federation—and EUR155 million will be offered in solidarity payments to non-participating European clubs.
The winning team will likely take home EUR97 million—not far off what they would get for lifting the Champions League trophy, but by playing fewer than half as many matches.
“Ultimately, money talks,” says Montague. “If FIFA can just make it in the financial interests of the people who own these clubs, then they’ll keep going, regardless of how tired the players are or how much it actually damages the goose that laid the golden egg, which is ultimately the Premier League and the domestic leagues of Europe.”
As European and FIFA chiefs argue back and forth about player fatigue, a number of teams—from Tunisia’s Espérance Sportive de Tunis to South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns—are gearing up to show everyone what they’re made of.
But while there are plenty of underdogs at this year’s Club World Cup, there’s only one amateur outfit. And when 15 June rolls around, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Auckland City FC’s team of salesmen, teachers and construction workers will line up against Bayern Munich, a surreal clash for all involved. Five days later, they’ll play Liga Portugal winners Benfica in Orlando, before flying to Nashville to face Argentina’s Boca Juniors for their final group game. Then… well, who knows? Stranger things have happened.
It should be said that this is not Auckland City’s first rodeo. As the most successful side in the history of Oceania’s island-hopping Champions League competition, they are veterans of the old Club World Cup format. But when the trophy touched down in Auckland for the final stop of the promo tour in March, they still felt the buzz.
For weeks, fans painted and pruned Kiwitea Street Stadium in time for the cup’s arrival in the club room, where Auckland City supporters gather and drink beer under cramped rows of photos, flags, football scarfs and pennants. “This 10-kilogramme hunk of gold will be sitting in the corner of a pub,” said the general manager Gordon Watson with a laugh when I spoke to him at the start of the year. “It’s not what [Infantino] pictured, I don’t think.” Fifty or so fans are planning to travel to America for the tournament.
If the new Club World Cup is a success, it’s hard to know what the knock-on effect will be. It will certainly embolden FIFA and club owners in their pursuit of globalising a game that is being ripped away from its roots. But it’s not just the European giants who are being impacted by football’s borderless ambitions. A proposed overhaul of the New Zealand league system—financially backed by FIFA, designed to professionalise proceedings—means that this year’s edition of the Club World Cup will likely be Auckland City’s last.
“With the changes to the Club World Cup structure, the influence of private equity, nation states being involved, money flooding the game from all over the world…” Watson says, exasperated. “You know, there’s not much room for the small corner shops like us.”
When the photo opportunities were over, the trophy was carefully boxed away and sent straight back to the White House. For a long time it took up residency next to the famous Oval Office desk, where it loomed over weapons briefings and executive orders. Trump seems to have grown quite fond of it. The inscription rings true: we are witness to a new age. The era of the FIFA Club World Cup.
Photographer: Aaron Tilley
Model Maker: Paul Baker (3D Studios)
