Football has long been about money, but every year the sport finds a new way to remind us just how much. Now it’s the Club World Cup’s turn. This summer’s bloated edition in the US is barely underway, and already FIFA is floating plans to expand it further. Increasing from 32 to 48 teams by 2029. Under pressure from the clubs who didn’t make the cut but still want their slice of the billion-dollar pie. If the game still pretends to be about glory, it’s only because glory pays.
Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Milan—big clubs with big commercial footprints—are aggrieved. They didn’t qualify under FIFA’s current system, which caps European entrants at 12. But this isn’t about fair play. It’s about brand value. These clubs aren’t lobbying for a more equitable format. They are lobbying because they’ve been priced out of the jackpot. The winners of this year’s tournament will bank nearly £100 million for playing just seven games. That’s close to what PSG made winning the Champions League. For the clubs left out for now, expansion is just good business.
And FIFA, ever the willing facilitator, is “open-minded” about changing the rules. Just as it was with the men’s World Cup, the women’s tournament, and every other cash cow that’s needed fattening. When the logic is financial, the outcome is always growth.
But this isn’t growth in any meaningful sense. It’s the metastatic growth of monopoly capital. Football as property speculation, as financial instrument, as branded entertainment. The Club World Cup isn’t a competition, it’s a product. And like all products under late capitalism, its success is measured not in meaning but in monetisation.
“The Club World Cup isn’t a competition, it’s a product.”
The Market Picks the Winner
The way in is no longer winning your league, or your domestic cup. It’s being too big to exclude. Brazil have four clubs in the mix; the US has three—because the tournament is there, and Club León broke ownership rules, and because the spectacle demands hosts and markets be represented. The cap of two clubs per country? Waived when it suits. UEFA rankings? Conveniently massaged. And yet even within this system, some global brands, as mentioned above—still find themselves shut out. They’re big, but not quite the right kind of big for this particular commercial jigsaw. In a tournament built on market logic, merit is not just incidental—it’s incoherent.
“The cap of two clubs per country? Waived when it suits.”
FIFA claim this is all for the good of the game, that fans want to see the biggest names on the biggest stage. But the truth is starker. FIFA couldn’t even flog the broadcast rights until DAZN stepped in, bankrolled by a Saudi petro-dollar injection. The Public Investment Fund, already knee-deep in Newcastle United and LIV Golf, now underwrites the Club World Cup too. This is a tournament greased with blood money, propped up by a regime that launders its image through sport. Add Adidas, Visa, Coca-Cola. Corporate holdouts who’ve come round just in time and you’ve got a tournament stitched together not by passion, but money and blood.
More Games, Fewer Stakes
The players’ union Fifpro, and European Leagues, have already filed a complaint with the European Commission. Not out of principle, but logistics. The calendar can’t take the strain. But FIFA call it hypocrisy and carry on. Clubs, meanwhile, talk of “overload” in public, and privately chase bigger cheques.
What’s unfolding is less an arms race, more a cartel war. Who gets in, who cashes out, and who gets left behind. And if that means expanding the Club World Cup to let more big names in, so be it. No one talks of competitive balance anymore. Only rights packages, brand exposure, and streaming figures.
Towards a Super League, by Stealth
The huge payouts for merely playing or winning the Club World Cup risk distorting domestic leagues in a way few want to admit. When teams can pocket up to £93 million for a short tournament—almost matching what Champions League winners get from UEFA—it changes the calculus entirely. Suddenly, prioritising Premier League or Serie A becomes secondary, especially when global prize money eclipses gate receipts and TV deals at home. Clubs might juggle line‑ups, rotate players, or even devalue league matches, not for performance reasons but financial ones. It compounds the problem of fixture congestion—players shuffle between domestic duties and lucrative international gigs, while clubs chase the fat cheque, eroding the integrity and rhythm of weekend football.
All of this starts to look and sound like a Super League by stealth. The format might be different, but the logic is the same: insulate the biggest clubs from risk, guarantee massive revenue, and make sure the global stage is dominated by a predictable elite. The question, then, is where’s UEFA in all this? Once vocal opponents of breakaway leagues, they now find themselves outflanked. If FIFA is cutting deals, lifting entry caps, and dangling £100m carrots, UEFA’s Champions League starts to look like the sideshow, not the main event. The regulatory body that once positioned itself as the guardian of European football is either asleep at the wheel—or quietly complicit.
“All of this starts to look and sound like a Super League by stealth.”
The Illusion of Welcome
At the centre of this spectacle stands FIFA’s president, fawning over Donald Trump like a courtier in a gilded hall, offering platitudes about partnership and opportunity while fans face a very different reality. For supporters travelling to the US for the Club World Cup—or the 2026 World Cup—there are no such assurances. Under Trump’s second presidency, immigration enforcement has intensified, and those without perfect paperwork risk arrest, deportation, or worse: disappearance into the legal no-man’s-land of ICE detention. While FIFA praises the host nation’s “hospitality,” fans from Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East (Iran?) will be made to feel the sharp end of border militarisation. The game is being globalised, but its audiences are being policed.
The Death of the Pyramid
The dream of promotion, of a cup upset, of an underdog story—it all becomes irrelevant when the game’s upper tiers detach entirely from the base. Domestic leagues are reduced to development arms, feudal fiefs whose purpose is to feed talent into the global churn. Football was always stratified, but it’s now slipping into a kind of closed aristocracy. A European Super League by other means, administered not by rebels but by FIFA itself.
Expansion will be dressed up as inclusivity. “More teams, more fans, more joy.” But don’t be fooled. This isn’t about making football global. It’s about making global football even more profitable. More contracts, more ad space, more territories opened up to the extractive logic of sport-as-asset.
“This isn’t about making football global. It’s about making global football even more profitable.”
They’ll tell us it’s progress. But all we’re watching is enclosure.
