What can the Club World Cup tell us about the strength of leagues around the world?

New York Times

a day ago

For those unaware, FIFA has established its own Technical Study Group (TSG) to analyse the Club World Cup this summer.
Led by their chief of global football development, Arsene Wenger, the panel contains former players and coaches — with Esteban Cambiasso, Aliou Cisse, Tobin Heath, Jurgen Klinsmann, Roberto Martinez, Gilberto Silva and Pascal Zuberbuhler unpicking the key insights from each game.
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A recent media release from the TSG saw the panel offer their views on the tournament at the midway stage, and the conclusions were rather… jarring in places.
'The competition is much tighter than expected. We wanted to create this Club World Cup to give the big clubs from all over the world the opportunity to come here,' said Wenger. 'It looks like it's the start of something that will never stop again.'
Yes, it is FIFA's job to promote the success of the tournament — even if some of what they are saying comes across as downright propaganda. In mitigation, the competition has not been without its significant moments — with Inter Miami's 2-1 group-stage victory over Porto soon followed up by Botafogo's 1-0 win over European champions Paris Saint-Germain (though the French club did heavily rotate for the match).
The Brazilian sides have been particularly impressive this summer, with Flamengo seeing off Chelsea in the group stage, before Fluminense's last-16 win over Inter Milan and subsequent victory over Al Hilal further highlighting the fact that clubs from the biggest country in South America should not be underestimated.
The most notable triumph was Saudi Arabian side Al Hilal's last-16 victory over Manchester City, in a game that accrued the highest cumulative expected goals (xG) in the competition so far — with 47 shots to feast your eyes on across the 120-plus minutes.
Did Al Hilal deserve the victory? Yes. Does that make Simone Inzaghi's side a better team than Pep Guardiola's? Well, no — football does not work in a ladder system where rankings swap if one team beats another.
Does it make the Saudi Pro League better than the Premier League? Again, not quite — even if Cristiano Ronaldo's recent comments might have you believe it.
Al Hilal's celebrations were ultimately short-lived, after Renato Gaucho's Fluminense beat them 2-1 in the quarter-finals and in doing so became the only non-European team to make the last four of the tournament.
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In some ways, this backs up FIFA's media release that states this summer's tournament has 'shown that high-quality football is played all over the world'.
This is a sentiment shared by Real Madrid head coach Xabi Alonso. 'The (Club) World Cup is showing us the high level of competition in other leagues,' Alonso said ahead of Madrid's quarter-final with Borussia Dortmund. 'Maybe we Europeans are not so familiar with it. The Saudi, Brazilian and even the Argentinian leagues. Sometimes in Europe we are too 'Championsised''.
That is true to an extent. We should not ignore how good certain clubs are across global football, but what these isolated cases in a summer tournament can teach us about the quality of leagues across the world is another question altogether.
Do FIFA's conclusions live and die within the confines of the competition itself? Or can we extrapolate each team's performances as indicative of their league's strength?
As The Athletic has previously analysed, footballing inequality can exist within any country, such that the strength of the best teams does not always represent the competitiveness, or quality, of the entire league itself — think Celtic and Rangers in the Scottish Premiership.
Using data from Twenty First Group, a sports intelligence firm that advises clubs, leagues and investors, we can look at the spread in quality across selected leagues whose teams have reached the latter stages of the Club World Cup — and we have thrown MLS in there for good measure.
Twenty First Group's World Super League model uses a machine-learning algorithm to generate a single rating for every team in world football. League strength can then be calculated from the average rating of each team.
As you can see below, there is plenty of spread across each league, but some clubs separate themselves from the pack more than others.
The Brazilian league is an interesting case. 'We currently rate Brazil's Serie A as the sixth-best league globally, so we expected the four Brazilian teams to be competitive pre-tournament,' said Twenty First Group's Senior Data Scientist, Aurel Nazmiu.
Crucially, it is not just the strength of the league but the compact distribution of teams within the Brazilian top flight that highlights the competitiveness of the division from top to bottom. As the strongest teams in the league, Palmeiras and Flamengo are not worlds apart from Juventude — the lowest-rated team.
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This is made clear when comparing the 'standard deviation' of team ratings across each league. This statistical term simply looks at the variability of a set of numbers. The larger the standard deviation, the more spread out the ratings are within the respective league.
Owing to the salary-cap system in the United States, MLS comes out with the lowest standard deviation and the highest competitiveness statistically. A close second is the Brazilian league, which can give us confidence that this summer's impressive performances by its four representatives at the tournament are proof of the quality of its league.
By contrast, the Saudi Pro League has the highest standard deviation across the division, with the riches of Al Hilal — and their fellow three clubs controlled by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) — dwarfing others within the country.
'Although we rate the Saudi Pro League as the 50th-best league globally, Al Hilal are significantly better than the rest of the league at the moment — ranked 132nd in the world in our models,' Nazmiu says. ' For context, the second-best Saudi team, Al Ahli, are much lower at 279.'
Among the top 50 leagues worldwide, the Saudi Pro League is ranked as the fifth-most unequal in terms of quality.
Contrast Al Hilal's global ranking of 132nd — sandwiched between the Bundesliga's Union Berlin and Spain's Las Palmas — with the lowest-ranked team in the Saudi Pro League in 2024-25, Al Orobah, who come in at 2,405th in the world. Al Orobah finished 17th last season with an average attendance of 2,307, lower than the average at Barnet (2,315) in England's fifth tier in 2024-25.
So Al Hilal's success this summer does not yet prove that the quality of the entire Saudi Pro League is on the rise.
Of course, European football is not exempt from such inequality, with Paris Saint-Germain dominant in France and the Portuguese trio of Benfica, Porto and Sporting CP dominating their top flight. You could very easily throw Bayern Munich in Germany into that argument across a 10-year window.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino said that 'a new era of football has definitely started' on social media after Al Hilal's victory over Manchester City last week — but is that an accurate declaration?
Yes, there has been some excellent football on show and some memorable support from die-hard fans who have made the journey from around the world. There has been drama, shocks, and some notable upsets.
However, to use this tournament as an advertisement for the increased competitiveness of the global game might just be a stretch too far.