Club World Cup explainer

How seriously will teams take this?

Given the prize money, I suspect team management is very interested in doing well. But it’s not quite that straightforward, mainly because the world does not play soccer on a unified calendar.

PSG and Inter Milan, for instance, just played the Champions League final a couple of weeks ago and you would think their best players would like a break. Most European teams start their preseason tours right around the time this tournament ends, and Argentina starts their Clausura around the same time. The Brazilian teams, meanwhile, are basically in midseason.

One thing that might tip the scales is how players are being compensated.

How are players being incentivized?

That’s been a big bone of contention, at least around here, for the past few weeks. One of the only teams to formally announce how much they’re paying the players is Real Madrid, who said everyone will get a $1 million bonus if they win the whole thing.

MLS, which is governed by a Collective Bargaining Agreement that was signed in 2021, is only mandated to give each team’s players $1 million to share. They’ve since offered to give them 20% of any performance bonuses on top of that.

The players believe they deserve more – maybe a lot more. They rejected the league’s offer and as of today there’s still no new agreement. You can read more about it here.

Suffice it to say, there’s a pretty basic logic that suggests paying players to do well is a seemingly virtuous cycle, especially in a tournament like this.

Where is that money coming from?

As you may have heard, FIFA spent the better part of the last two years trying to talk various broadcasters into paying them $1 billion for the broadcast rights. AppleTV was the early favorite but walked away. Presumably ESPN, Paramount, NBC and every other broadcaster weighed it over and declined, too.

Finally, a channel you likely have never watched called DAZN met that $1 billion valuation and agreed to stream every game for free. Later it was announced that select games would be broadcast in English on TNT and in Spanish on various Univision channels.

DAZN doesn’t have a huge presence in the United States, but is pretty big in other parts of the world and is apparently hoping to use this tournament to break into the market here.

While there are other forms of income being generated from things like sponsorship and ticket sales, this is easily the single-biggest chunk of money that FIFA got and is the main reason they think they can pull this off at a profit.

Are fans pretty excited?

I would say it’s generous to call the interest “mixed.” While I think it’s possible that fans will get more excited as the tournament gets on and the reality sets in of watching some of the best clubs in the world play matches with real stakes, right now tickets sales are pretty awful.

Over the past few weeks, FIFA has been reducing prices consistently, offering deep discounts for the opener between Leo Messi’s Inter Miami and Egypt’s Al Ahly and even giving away free tickets to the Sounders-Botafogo match. Many of the games have tens of thousands of available tickets, in large part because FIFA originally priced these like high-demand games despite there being virtually no buzz about this tournament.

Why is this happening?

Money is the obvious — and frankly correct — answer. But how cynical of a ploy it is depends on your perspective. Essentially, this is FIFA’s attempt to horn in on the market that UEFA effectively owns now. There is no disputing that the UEFA Champions League winner is the de facto “best team in the world” and its final is watched by even more global viewers on an annual basis than the Super Bowl. In fact, the only event that is bigger is the World Cup.

But that’s really FIFA’s only big money maker, and if they’re going to remain the dominant force in world football, they figure they need to also have the biggest club tournament. The Club World Cup is their attempt to grab that market.

Without getting too deep down that rabbit hole, though, I’ll just suggest you read this excellent piece by Yahoo!’s Henry Bushnell.

How will the Sounders do?

The Sounders are in what most seem to agree is the toughest group in the whole tournament. They’ll open against the reigning Copa Libertadores champions, Botafogo, on Sunday. After that, they’ll play Atletico Madrid on June 19, an opponent who finished third in Spain’s La Liga and was fifth best in the 36-team Group Phase of the UEFA Champions League. The Sounders will close out against PSG, who just won the Champions League final 5-0 to cap off a treble that included winning France’s Ligue 1 and the Coupe de France.

Frankly, a realistic goal should be for the Sounders to just stay competitive in each game. Getting a single point would be a huge accomplishment, getting a win would be a massive upset, and getting out of the group would be arguably more impressive than winning the 2022 CCL.

Isn’t that a little disrespectful?

You could look at that way, but Obed Vargas was asked that exact question and this is what he said: “Yeah but I can’t fault them for it. It’s clear, there are different levels to the game. But we take this as an opportunity to prove those people wrong, to compete, to prove it to ourselves more than anyone else.

“I think if you ask the players, they’re not nervous. They’re happy, they’re excited. This might be the only opportunity to play these teams in Seattle, in our stadium, in our home. We’re going to have fun. It’s a game, it’s an unbelievable moment for us. That’s how we’re trying to look at it.”

Who else is playing in Seattle?

There are a total of six games scheduled to be played at Lumen Field. In addition to the three Sounders games, there are three teams from Group E who will play two games apiece here. Japan’s Urawa Reds face Argentina’s River Plate on June 17; UEFA Champions League finalist Inter Milan play Urawa on June 21; and Inter Milan play River Plate on June 25. Monterrey is the fourth team in that group, but play all their games at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl.

Are tickets still available for those games?

Oh my god, yes. There are so many tickets available and some of them are actually pretty cheap.

Any cool tech getting debuted?

As it turns out, there will be a few “innovations” on display during the tournament:

• The most interesting one is that fans inside the stadium will now get to see exactly what the referees are looking at when they use VAR, with the footage being played on the big screens.
• Referees will also be wearing bodycams and the footage is going to be incorporated into broadcasts.
• They are unveiling something called “Advanced semi-automated offside technology” which is going to take multiple camera angles, a sensor inside the ball and artificial intelligence that combines to give even more data to VAR, but with a real person making the final determination.
• Finally substitutions will be handled digitally on tablets as opposed to the physical cards that had to be handed over manually.
• It’s not a tech related, but FIFA has promised to seriously enforce the 8-second rule for goalkeepers. As soon as a goalkeeper has possession, referees will start visibly counting down and if they get to zero a corner kick will be awarded to the other team.

Will this be fun?

Despite everything I said, I still think there’s a lot of potential for this to be a fun tournament, especially for Seattle soccer fans. Six super interesting teams are going to be coming to our town along with a sizable chunk of their fans. I know I’m looking forward to watching them play, even if the stadiums aren’t packed. That we can now get good tickets for reasonable prices only makes it more intriguing to me.

Once the tournament moves into the knockout phase, I also think there’s some real potential for teams to turn up the intensity and play some compelling games. I’m skeptical this tournament will ever be able to compete with the UEFA Champions League and it’s hard to see how it ever becomes a true club equivalent to the World Cup, but it doesn’t have to be either of those things to be worth watching, either.