LAFC beats Club America 2-1 to clinch spot in 2025 Club World Cup

The quadrennial Club World Cup has become a trajectory-changing opportunity for soccer teams worldwide. FIFA, desperate to make the Club World Cup a headline event, has invested unprecedented sums of prize money in the competition to encourage teams to take it seriously. Each of the 32 teams, which hail from all six of FIFA's continental zones, receives nearly $10M just for qualifying. They'll take home millions more for individual game wins and rack up nearly $100M for lifting the trophy.

But how did LAFC and Club America enter this story? A few months ago, the tournament lineup looked set, but the late discovery of a multi-club ownership violation flipped the script. FIFA learned that two of Mexico's Club World Cup representatives — Pachuca and Club Leon — shared an owner, and forced the ownership group to select one of its two clubs to compete to avoid match-fixing within the tournament. The group chose Pachuca, Club Leon was disbarred from the Club World Cup, and FIFA turned to the rest of the North America region to determine which team should take its place.

In the end, FIFA couldn't decide between LAFC (Concacaf Champions Cup finalist, US Open Cup winner, perennial trophy favorite) and Club America (seven-time Concacaf Champions Cup winner, Liga MX runner-up in 2024-25). In a bold move without precedent, FIFA asked LAFC and Club America to decide for them via a one-off play-in match in the style of the NBA. While this play-in game ultimately fell short of being a classic, the $10M riding on it made it the most valuable game in the history of North American club soccer. 

LAFC's victory earns it that $10M and puts it on a path to face some of the best teams in the world this summer. It will kick off its Club World Cup journey on Monday, June 16, against England's Chelsea FC, and will go on to face Tunisia's ES Tunis and Brazil's Flamengo in the group stage. If it advances out of that group, LAFC will be put on a collision course with the likes of Germany's Bayern Munich, Argentina's Boca Juniors, and France's recently crowned European champions, Paris Saint-Germain.