Why 'strange,' sparsely attended FIFA Club World Cup is a disaster

It was supposed to be a new beginning, the start of FIFA's foray into club soccer. But the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup — the brainchild of controversial FIFA president Gianni Infantino and played in the heat in the United States — is a disaster.

Players are protesting (h/t The Guardian). Tickets are going unsold for the 32-team tournament (h/t Sports Business Journal). And FIFA, in a desperate attempt to make stadiums look full, is moving fans into seats opposite each stadium's television cameras to give the illusion of a packed house (h/t The Daily Mirror).

It's a bad look for FIFA and the United States as both prepare to run the World Cup in 2026.

Some of the Club World Cup's woes are understandable; a game between South Korea's Ulsan and South Africa's Mamelodi Sundowns was never going to draw a huge crowd in the U.S., and indeed just 3,412 fans showed at Orlando's 25,500-seat Inter & Co Stadium for that match. 

But many of the tournament's problems are self-inflicted. Why, for instance, did FIFA book a 25,500-seat stadium for a match that was never going to be much of a draw? 

Why is Los Angeles FC, one of the three Major League Soccer representatives in the tournament, playing all of its games on the East Coast? (The manager for LAFC's first opponent, England's Chelsea FC, called the atmosphere "strange" when the teams played in Atlanta, per ESPN.com. The match attracted only 22,137 fans.)

Why is this tournament taking place during club soccer's offseason? Why is it occurring at the same time as the Concacaf Gold Cup, North America's premier international tournament and the U. S. Men's National Team's last set of competitive fixtures before next summer's World Cup? 

Why is FIFA celebrating that it sold nearly 1.5 million Club World Cup tickets when, amortized across the tournament's 64-game schedule, those 1.5 million tickets amount to an average of just 23,438 tickets sold per game? (The vast majority of games are in venues that seat 40,000+ spectators.)

The answer, as it usually is with FIFA, is greed. 

FIFA has watched the UEFA Champions League — the world's premier club soccer competition — turn into a commercial juggernaut in the 21st century, and it wants a piece of the action. 

When FIFA created the Club World Cup in 2000 to compete with the Champions League, it envisioned it as an eight-team affair taking place in a natural club soccer schedule break in December. Fans, clubs and players had no interest in that, though, so FIFA swung big, blowing up the tournament to 32 teams and placing it in a late spring/summer slot. 

In a bid to further entice global teams to participate, FIFA flooded the Club World Cup's prize pool with cash. Teams receive just shy of $10M for competing; the winning team will take home nearly $100M.

Soccer fans aren't dumb, though, and they know a stunt when they see one. And thus far, that's all this Club World Cup is: a naked, regrettable stunt.

The tournament continues Wednesday (June 18) with three matches.