As Club World Cup gifts its riches a proper plan is needed for those left behind

The Guardian

19-06-2025

While a dozen of Europe's elite clubs were chasing the American dream, 170 of their less garlanded peers gathered for a barbecue next to Lake Geneva. They had converged on Uefa's headquarters to attend the qualifying round draws for next season's continental competitions; Tuesday night was time to get together, perhaps to speed-date representatives of the team you had been paired with or simply to cut loose before a labyrinthine summer spent journeying in search of league-phase football.
Borussia Dortmund were slugging out a goalless draw with Fluminense while the meat hit the grills, but 'Club World Cup' is a dirty formulation in Nyon's corridors of power. Any available screens showed action from Uefa's own Under-21 Championship and alternative sources of entertainment roamed the pastel green lawns. A caricature artist did the rounds, stopping at the table occupied by Aleksander Ceferin and putting his pencil to work.
The picture for these smaller clubs may be similarly distorted, but the humorous aspect is lacking. Uefa were correct to trumpet the event's symbolism in their pre-draw publicity: a vibrant collage of European football life was present, from the storied names of Red Star Belgrade and Rangers to Iberia 1999 of Georgia and Estonia's Paide Linnameeskond. However, beneath the collegiality it is impossible to escape the sense of a majority being left far behind, with ideas to redress the balance painfully few and largely inadequate.
Most of Europe's clubs stand no chance of keeping pace with a top-level juggernaut that has unhitched itself and careered away. Some occupy an untenable half-space, unable to seriously challenge those in the big five leagues while crushing domestic opposition with the money on offer from the Champions League, Europa League or Conference League.
Nobody is squarely to blame for trends that owe much to late-stage capitalism and geopolitical forces but there may be a less charitable outlook towards those who fail to act. There is particular concern that the revamped Champions League, for all the triumphalism around its 36-team group format, will have the variety squeezed from it. Nineteen of its slots will be filled by English, German, Spanish and Italian clubs in 2025-26, six from the Premier League alone. For proud institutions such as Malmö, Dynamo Kyiv and Panathinaikos the hopes of tracing a path to one of the seven playoff qualifying berths are achingly remote.
European football's top-heaviness is little secret but alarm bells ring louder when consequences begin to rear up lower down. In this season's qualifying rounds only the Armenian club Noah and Pafos, from Cyprus, are debutants in the Champions League. That is the lowest figure for 14 years, according to research carried out for the Union of European Clubs (UEC), and indicates that the monotony felt closer to the summit is becoming a consistent theme domestically.
Should that be exacerbated the fear is that, as one figure at a leading club suggests, national leagues in their current form will be living on borrowed time. The example of Serbia is instructive. Red Star, who have won eight consecutive titles, will earn a basic £16m if they follow projections and reach the league phase this summer. If the qualifying rounds proceed as expected their three compatriots in the Europa League and Conference League will fail to get that far. Novi Pazar or Radnicki 1923, their representatives in the latter, would take no more than £1m from that best-case scenario of elimination at the playoff stage.
The pattern would only be reinforced. There will always be clubs of wildly varying size but the disparity in funding has never been starker. For Red Star's part, they and their equivalents can only gawp at the bare minimum $12.81m (£9.6m) European sides will receive from appearing at the Club World Cup. In most cases that figure will be multiplied several times over by its conclusion.
The clear danger is that three strata are emerging in Europe, separated by financial chasms that have become impossible to mitigate. Solidarity payments, a subject of fierce bargaining annually, are one of Uefa's ways to soften the divide. Clubs absent from European competition receive 7% of the annual £3.7bn revenue from those flagship events, a further 3% being allocated to those eliminated in the qualifying phase.
It is certainly well meant, and has increased markedly for the current three-year cycle, but will not unseat the status quo. Creative solutions are needed and it caught the attention last month when the UEC, formed in 2023 to represent non-elite clubs, unveiled its plan for a 'player development reward'. Under that scheme, a further 5% of revenue from club competitions would be redistributed to the teams whose academies developed those competing in them. It has been taken seriously enough for European Leagues to have discuss it in depth last week.
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Any European club not playing in the Champions League proper could benefit. UEC's formula, devised with Transfermarkt, takes into account the on-pitch time each player has spent and the prize money they have helped generate. The Italian fourth-tier club Pavia, where Federico Acerbi came through the ranks, would have earned £275,000 through his playing 670 minutes en route to last month's final with Inter.
In 2023-24 nearly 1,500 clubs would have benefited from this kind of payment. Jude Bellingham's success with Real Madrid would have handed Birmingham City £827,000; Vorskla Poltava, struggling in Ukraine, would have received £679,000 for their club's successes; MSK Zilina, trailing behind Slovan Bratislava's Champions League earnings in Slovakia, would have taken £1.3m. At the top end Ajax's remarkable production line, picked off so frequently, would have earned them £4.6m.
Neither UEC's plan nor any other, including Uefa's welcome £200m pot for clubs with players at the past two European Championships, will mend things alone. But it would be a step in the right direction, perhaps helping narrow the gap between those two layers under the elite. Football beneath the ultra-privileged minority will only thrive with integrated incentives that reward clubs for their contributions to the ecosystem.
Maybe that, even more than the prospect of a Champions League winner from those clubs assembled by the lake, is a pipedream. In greeting the new European season Ceferin rightly hailed the diversity of the scene he oversees; perhaps Uefa's appointed artist could have warned him what happens when, for all anyone's good intentions, a work of beauty is defaced for ever.