UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin snubs Club World Cup amid FIFA tensions
While all other confederations have been represented at some stage by their presidents during this tournament, Ceferin, who is also a FIFA vice-president by virtue of his role at UEFA, has stayed away from the competition.
Advertisement
Sources familiar with the situation, but not authorised to speak publicly, believe senior executives at UEFA are concerned by FIFA's encroachment on the club game, the possible expansion of the Club World Cup and the potential of the Club World Cup to one day challenge the hegemony of the UEFA Champions League as the world's most popular club competition.
On Saturday, during a press briefing at Trump Tower in Manhattan, FIFA president Gianni Infantino refused to rule out the possibility of expanding the Club World Cup to include more European teams next time around, while also avoiding the question when asked directly by The Athletic if he would like the Club World Cup to take place every two years rather than every four years.
Infantino namechecked Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Barcelona, Milan and Napoli as teams he would like to see involved, but it is unclear as to how the qualification formula, or country cap, may change to give those teams a better chance of being at the tournament.
Infantino hailed the financial benefits of the tournament, praising the $2.1billion (£1.6bn) generated in revenues, across the TV deal, sponsorship, ticketing and other income. 'For 63 matches, the basic average is $33million per match. There is no other club competition in the world today that comes anywhere close. It is already the most successful club competition on all different measures,' he claimed.
The winner of the Club World Cup, according to figures published by FIFA, may earn up to $125m (£93.5m). Yet this is less than the $154m that UEFA recently announced Real Madrid earned by winning the Champions League in 2024 — but FIFA would argue that the Club World Cup is worth more per game (given the winner plays a maximum of seven games over a month tournament, while the Champions League is played throughout the season).
But speaking to The Athletic during an event at Paris Saint-Germain's flagship 5th Avenue store in Manhattan on Saturday afternoon, the PSG chief executive Victoriano Melero stated his belief the tournament should remain every four years.
The Athletic asked UEFA earlier this week why Ceferin has not attended any matches during the Club World Cup in the United States, particularly as 12 UEFA club teams competed at the tournament and three — Real Madrid, PSG and Chelsea — made the semi-finals.
In an email, an unnamed UEFA spokesperson said: 'In case it slipped your mind, UEFA and its president's full attention is currently focused on the Women's EURO. This is a major event for us, and understandably, it requires significant commitment and attention.'
Advertisement
The Athletic has subsequently learned that Ceferin has attended only one of the first 22 matches of the Women's European Championship in Switzerland while the Club World Cup also began on June 13, a couple of weeks before the women's Euros began on July 2. UEFA declined to comment. Ceferin previously did not attend the Women's World Cup final in 2023, which was contested by two European nations, England and Spain.
Ceferin, as a confederation president and FIFA Council vice-president, is eligible to receive a net annual compensation from FIFA of $300,000. Neither UEFA nor FIFA commented in May when asked whether he accepts this money from FIFA.
It's also curious that the official UEFA social media account on Twitter/X has not made any reference to the Club World Cup or highlighted the roles of European teams or players during a tournament which had large UEFA club representation and will have an all-European final. The Conmebol account has, by contrast, been posting regularly about South American players and teams excelling at the tournament.
The situation follows dramatic scenes in Paraguay in May, when the UEFA members of the FIFA Council staged a walkout at the FIFA Congress following the late arrival of Infantino.
The eight UEFA members of the FIFA Council and several European delegates did not return after the early afternoon break.
The exit followed a three-hour delay to the Congress, because Infantino was late arriving for his own event on Thursday morning, having prioritised meetings with United States president Donald Trump in Qatar that week.
This included rescheduling the FIFA Council, which should have been in person in Asuncion on the Tuesday, but was instead held virtually on the Friday.
UEFA said the 'deeply regrettable' late timetable change due to 'what appears to be simply to accommodate private political interests' put football's interests second.
Advertisement
UEFA said: 'We are all in post to serve football; from the streets to the podium, and UEFA members of the FIFA Council felt the need on this occasion to make a point that the game comes first and to leave as originally scheduled.'
Infantino did apologise at the start of the Congress for being late. He said: 'As president of FIFA, my responsibility is to take decisions in the interests of the organisation. I decided to spend the last two days in the Middle East, knowing the 2034 World Cup will be in Saudi Arabia and the 2022 World Cup was in Qatar. The 2025 Club World Cup and 2026 World Cup will be in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Some important World Cup discussions took place and I needed to be there to represent football and all of you. We had an issue with our flight, which made this delay happen — apologies, sorry, and I am looking forward to spending time with you here.'
The Athletic approached FIFA for comment but it has not done so at time of publication.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
5 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Liverpool interested in £35m world champion
Liverpool are monitoring Christopher Nkunku According to L'Equipe, the Reds are interested in the French forward. The 27-year-old has it difficult to translate his form at Leipzig over to Chelsea and so just two years after his initial move, the signs are suggesting that he could be headed out the door this summer. Advertisement He's averaging a goal contribution every 125 minutes, but 10 of his 23 goals and assists have come in the Conference League, which the Blues won at the end of last season, beating Real Betis 4-1. In the latest Club World Cup campaign, he delivered a mixture of performances. At times, he was looking promising, to such an extent that Chelsea fans considered the idea that he might remain at the club for next season, but it appears as though he is still headed elsewhere.
Motor Trend
7 minutes ago
- Motor Trend
The Future Of Porsche's Racing Tech Transfer to Street Cars? Software.
On April 12, 2025, Porsche made history, becoming the first automaker to win three classes of professional motorsports with three different powertrains on the same day. In California, a 963 hybrid won the LMDh class and took the overall win at the IMSA Long Beach Grand Prix while a 911 GT3 R won the GTD Pro class in the same race with pure combustion engine. Across the country, the 99X Electric won the Miami e-prix in Formula E on pure battery power. Different as they may be, each shares a common link with the Porsche road cars you can buy today and in the future. Porsche uses motorsport to drive tech innovation, focusing on software as the key to improving road cars. Software impacts drivability and efficiency, with lessons from racing series shared across projects. This approach is cost-effective and enhances both performance and development. This summary was generated by AI using content from this MotorTrend article Read Next Racing Technology for the Street 'We have a philosophy that, yes, motorsport is part of our DNA,' Porsche vice president of motorsport, Thomas Laudenbach, told MotorTrend , 'and I cannot imagine Porsche without motorsport, but we are not doing motorsport for the sake of its own. We do motorsport to give a contribution to the company, and this is exactly what we are talking about.' In the past, tech transfer from racing to the road consisted mostly of more power and better aerodynamics, but as everything on a car has become linked and controlled by computers, the next frontier is in the software that controls them. Hard parts like engines, suspension, and aerodynamics are fairly mature technologies, but automotive software is still in its relative infancy. 'It is still a very steep curve,' Laudenbach said. 'It's growing so fast, it's changing so fast…I mean, if you look at the combustion engine, obviously development [today] is slower like this because you know, it is more and more difficult to make the [next] step. If you look at the software, not only software itself, how we approach it, the tools…I would say [it is] still very steep, the curve, how fast it changes.' It's All in the Software In all three racing series, physical parts on the cars are heavily regulated, particularly when it comes to batteries and electric motors. Software, though, isn't and has become the most important factor in improving lap times and efficiency. 'Everything you can do on the software has a much bigger impact and a much bigger effect in the drivability,' Porsche Formula E driver and reigning champion, Pascal Wehrlein, told MotorTrend , 'because yeah, there's also software things in in a combustion engine, but the effect is just smaller than an electric car. We pay a lot of attention to the software and I would say that is our biggest toolbox for setting up the car and getting quicker and so on. And there's just so many more things you can do on the software compared to a combustion engine. 'How much we are going into the details,' he continued, 'into the smallest details, I would say on the software side is even more than what I did when I was in Formula One, just because there are so many different options on, you know, the four-wheel drive, how to set up the four-wheel drive. How much work do you want to have at the front? At which point in time in the corner you want to have more front torque or less? What you can do on the braking side, on the [energy] recuperation, setting it up for different corners? In certain corners, where it's high speed, you need something different than in the low-speed corner, but then also when the track is bumpy, or not bumpy. We are going so much into the details.' Lauderbach agrees. 'It's absolutely right. We always love about talking about hardware. And I did develop combustion engines for 18 years, so I'm a real mechanical guy, and it's absolutely right, probably the bigger part is software. And but this is the good thing about it because some things [physical] we are not allowed to touch [under the regulations]. But we have a big freedom of software, and I think that's good because racing should give freedom where it is beneficial also for your brand. And that's certainly in software and I think this is probably also the biggest change between the projects.' Because the applications are so different, it's not as simple as just sharing code between teams in different series or with the engineers working on the road cars. Instead, it's the exchange of knowledge and ideas which brings this tech to cars like the 911 GTS T-hybrid. 'It's for sure not a carryover part,' Laudenbach said, 'but it's from learning about the difficulties, about the weak points, about the solutions, for sure they benefit from each other. 'When you have more than one project,' he said, 'you just work it on in a wider range and then you always find synergy. These two programs (Formula E and LMDh) benefit from each other in various areas. And at the same time, this is linked so close to our road car development. We work a lot on road cars as well in the motorsport department and do benefit from each other. If you tell your engineers, oh, please sit together with these guys from this program, then you know what they do? They sit together for an hour, they chat, and they go to it. If you sit side by side, if you meet each other with a coffee, this is the best way to benefit from each other. These two programs benefit, but also this is very beneficial to what we do on road cars, even inside the motorsport department.' It's not just about making the cars faster, either. Power makes heat, and heat needs to be dealt with before it breaks things, on a race car or a road car. Efficiency matters in racing because using less fuel or electricity allows you to go farther between pit stops, and it matters for the same reason on the street. 'Look at Formula E,' Laudenbach said. 'It's not our battery, but we control the thermal system [and] energy management. That's a lot of control systems. That's a lot of software. I mean, if we work with AI in the meantime and there you can learn a lot of the one side and transfer it to the other. Sometimes then you figure out that, okay, I can only take this because this [other technology] is not allowed. It's never carry over one to one. 'But you still learn a lot about how to handle it. It's software functions, it's control systems, it's sometimes also just the tools that we use, the approach that you take is not always [about] the final product. In the end, you have the product, there, no matter if it's software, hardware, but it's also, how do you approach it, because you're always looking for being most efficient. Especially Formula E, [where] we have a cost cap. It's a factor to say, okay, can I reach a certain goal with the smallest amount of money? These kind of things we always exchange because it's in the background.' Cheaper and Easier Not only are software learnings easier to transfer between programs, software is also easier to iterate on and less expensive to develop. 'Compared to hardware,' he said, 'it's not that cost intensive. Yes, you have you have the labor. But you know, you' not always having to change your bits and pieces. And don't forget, if you talk about bits and pieces, you always have to stop and throw parts away. So it's a lot more, let's say, cost efficient.' Whether in the office or trackside, the way data is managed and analyzed has changed a lot in the past decade. 'If we would do it like 10 years ago,' Lauderbach said, 'where the engineer himself goes through all the raw data, that doesn't work anymore. You got to feed your data through automatic analysis. It's just more [a question of], how do you analyze? How do you get something out in order to make the car quicker? This is a lot more or this is high sophisticated, a lot more automation and algorithms, than 10 years ago. 'It's a software basically to calculate what the car's doing because you got sensors. Obviously, you want to calculate some figures, you see what the car's doing in order to feature simulations. The simulation then gives you back again in which direction you have to go.'
Motor Trend
8 minutes ago
- Motor Trend
Rivian Is Integrating Google Maps Into Its Native Navigation Software
Fresh off major upgrades to its R1S SUV and R1T pickup, Rivian is now set to launch a software update of its onboard navigation system to include Google Maps data—both for the new vehicles it's producing and its existing customer cars. This isn't simply Google Maps like the app on your phone, however. Leveraging Google's Automotive SDK, Rivian has, in effect, overlaid its existing navigation experience over that of Google Maps, taking advantage of the internet giant's superior "routing, estimated time of arrivals, traffic updates, search capabilities, and satellite imagery," as Rivian put it, in order to further augment its own in-house "EV-friendly navigation features." Rivian is updating its R1S SUV and R1T pickup navigation systems to integrate Google Maps, blending Google's routing, traffic, and imagery with Rivian's EV-specific features. The update includes a new interface and extends to the Rivian Mobile App, rolling out starting tomorrow. This summary was generated by AI using content from this MotorTrend article Read Next In other words, Rivian's navigation system will now blend Google's superior mapping capabilities with its proprietary charging information, including estimated range and battery capacity remaining at your destination, route planning, real-time charging info, and more. In addition, Rivian skins the whole interface in its own design, a new version of which will also debut with the Google Maps update. Even better, Rivian says the update will extend to its Rivian Mobile App (a 2025 MotorTrend Best Tech award winner), which benefits from Google-like photos and descriptions of searched destinations, as well as satellite map views and real-time traffic data. As before, users can send trips and navigation destinations from the app to their Rivians, and now they'll be able to use the "share" function via Google Maps to do the same. The rollout of the new Google-augmented system is imminent—Rivian says it'll begin doing so as soon as tomorrow via an over-the-air update for every all-electric R1S SUV and R1T pickup it has sold to date, and it will come already equipped with every new model it sells.
