The biggest Club World Cup question is still unanswered – does anyone care?

Yahoo

5 days ago

There is the £1bn broadcasting deal, the £97m prize for the winners, the guarantee of a minimum of over £30m in revenue for the Premier League participants. There is the possibility of the kind of windfall that could bring domestic dominance for a club from outside Europe. There is the potential reward of cracking America, as everyone looks to build their brand.
In a sense, though, the Club World Cup depends upon a different kind of investment. Whatever the big financial figures, it needs buy-in: not from Fifa's partners but from the part of the footballing family who are rarely consulted, the fans.
Advertisement
The Club World Cup is in a battle for hearts and minds and eyeballs. It is a matter if – and it is too early to draw definitive conclusions – people buy into it; if they invest their time, their hopes and their emotions.
It is perhaps easiest to assess the match-going public. The empty seats suggest Fifa misjudged the equation of supply and demand, selecting some venues that were too big and making tickets too expensive. It is partly about the American fans, partly an issue of how many clubs have brought a sizeable travelling support, and the evidence is mixed.
But there is a broader test, conducted not in Atlanta or Seattle but in armchairs and sofas. How many are tuning in and how often?
Because there are audiences Fifa will be chasing, hoping the interest they display in established competitions is transferred to a new – or expanded, or reinvented – one. There is the summer tournament audience, those who, if they can, would try to watch every game of a World Cup or European Championship; will they assume the same approach with a Club World Cup?
The Club World Cup has suffered from plenty of empty seats at certain games (Reuters)
There are questions over the interest levels in the revamped tournament (Reuters)
There are those who, in the group stages and last 16, would not go that far, but would tune in for the main game of the day. Are they carving out a couple of hours every night for the Club World Cup?
Advertisement
Then there is the Champions League precedent. With multiple matches on at the same time, no one sees everything. But there are plenty who will watch something on every match night, and then, when the fixtures are fewer, will not miss anything at the business end of the tournament.
The Club World Cup contains some of the same sides, the possibility of the same match-ups. Would those who, with no allegiance to any of the sides, automatically watch a Champions League semi-final between, say, Juventus and Bayern Munich or Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, adopt the same attitude? Or, to use a parallel from 2022, will the neutrals who came to cheer on Morocco in their surprise surge to the semi-finals of the World Cup do likewise if Botafogo or Palmeiras, Flamengo or Fluminense charge into the last four now? Or will they simply sit this one out?
It is a question of if the Club World Cup becomes appointment viewing; if millions, across the footballing world and separately, resolve to make a date in their diaries.
And if the answers will be different, with the early indications that South America has bought into the Club World Cup more than Europe, there are a host of factors. They include time and weather: for the European audience, the late kick-offs are off-putting; for everyone, the risk of 100-degree heat can diminish the spectacle of the earlier ones.
South America appears to have embraced the Club World Cup more than Europe (Getty)
They can relate specifically to the United States, but there are wider issues. There is the crisis of legitimacy with the Infantino algorithm for qualification, whereby Lionel Messi's Inter Miami were crowbarred into the tournament, and, seemingly, there were attempts to find Cristiano Ronaldo a club for a month. Separately, there is the Ceferin criteria that means that, somehow, Red Bull Salzburg are in a tournament that does not feature the reigning champions of England, Italy or Spain, or two of the Champions League semi-finalists.
Advertisement
There is the ennui and exhaustion felt by players and public alike; many footballers' comments last year were hints they knew their workload was unsustainable, but presumably they have been silenced by executives who want the profits from the competition. Yet the sense of overkill has been apparent among many a football fan.
While there were legitimate reasons to want a Club World Cup, this competition has been imposed on everyone without consultation or consideration, and that can alienate some potential viewers. Fifa's hype and hyperbole, pronouncing everything they do a glorious success, is propaganda rather than analysis – perhaps some are voting with their remote controls by turning off.
There is the football itself. Some games have been like pre-season friendlies, with heavily rotated teams that bear no resemblance to the clubs' strongest sides, with managers taking the understandable view that their season has almost 12 months left to run. Which, in itself, is an admission that it ends with the Champions League final and the World Cup.
Botafogo stunned Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain (Reuters)
A danger for this Club World Cup is that European fans can zone out of summer games in the United States, unless they are in an actual World Cup, anyway. There are annual matches, some in tournaments with grandiose names – the International Champions Cup or the World Football Challenge – that carry absolutely no prestige.
Advertisement
If the Club World Cup can redress a global imbalance – the dominance of the five major European leagues – it probably can't do so without sufficient engagement from this side of the Atlantic, and not merely because some of the most lucrative television markets are here.
It is too easy, too simplistic, to dismiss all the scepticism as Anglocentric, a 21st-century version of the Little Englander syndrome that led this country to skip the first three World Cups, when the Champions League can feel the ultimate in the club game on the mainland as well. It is scarcely conclusive proof, but in five days in a continental European city last week, there seemed no evidence of bars or restaurants showing the Club World Cup, or that it was even on. It is hard to imagine a similar indifference to football in the summer of 2024 or 2026.
There is ample proof that European football fans are prepared to commit to a summer tournament every two years, whether the World Cup or the European Championship, but not lesser tournaments. There are plenty of competing attractions in the summer sporting schedule – football does not always succeed when it attempts to park its tanks on their lawn.
And, in this case, Fifa is also trying to overshadow the rest of the same sport, whether it's the women's European Championship, the men's Under-21 tournament or the Gold Cup. The game's governing body does not always capture the imagination with its competitions. Undoubtedly, some people cared about the Confederations Cup. Just not enough for Fifa and not enough to dominate the popular consciousness.
Fifa has tried to outshine other football competitions with the Club World Cup (AP)
Does the Club World Cup? It may be too soon to tell. Organic growth – as opposed to imposing a tournament and expecting it to be an instant hit – can take time. Anything new has not yet become a habit for many.
Advertisement
But each of us among the intended audience faces a decision: how much value we attach to the Club World Cup. It has had shock scorelines, the unexpectedly early eliminations of Atletico Madrid and Porto, and the spirited progress of the Brazilian clubs. But plotlines are more enthralling, characters more compelling and the narrative only addictive if you are sufficiently invested in it.
Some, undeniably, are. Others are not. For them, the Club World Cup has been the breaking point, something they are deliberately switching off. Some will be picking and choosing their games, or vaguely paying attention. Different people will provide different answers. But for the Club World Cup to genuinely prosper, it needs a critical mass who want it, want to watch it, and want to watch almost all of it.