FIFA Club World Cup

FIFA has seen the money in the Champions League and has always wanted to add a potentially lucrative club competition to its assets.

The Confederation Cup was an idea that started in 1992 and expanded to eight teams, from four, in 1997. It became a once every four years tournament taking place one year before the World Cup in the same country as the World Cup host. It became a de facto warm up for the World Cup host. Commercially it wasn’t the biggest success and FIFA has now decided to scrap it, for now at least. Scraping it presents FIFA with an opportunity to expand on its also not very successful annual FIFA Club World Cup (previously Intercontinental Cup) which had grown from two teams to six in recent seasons. The aforementioned six team tournament takes place in the middle of the European season in December and scrapping the summer Confederations Cup allows FIFA to move it to a more friendlier summer time.

The European Club Association which represents many European clubs opposes this and doesn’t want its members to participate until at least 2024. The year is significant for the clubs because there are fixture calendar agreement until that date and any change to it are opposed by clubs. After 2024 there may or may not be an agreement for the World Club Cup, which is due to include eight European teams and eight groups of three.

Any additions to the fixture list are an over burden and potentially dangerous for the players. As it stands the players and quality of football benefit from even less games, even as far as reducing top leagues to 18 teams, from 20.