Club World Cup: how the 32-team format works and what it pays

For twenty years the Club World Cup was a short seven-team tournament played over two December weeks, which European football treated as an obligation and South American football as the game of a lifetime. In 2025 FIFA threw that design away and started again: thirty-two clubs, a World Cup format, one edition every four years and a billion dollars in prize money. The first was held in the United States, and Chelsea beat Paris Saint-Germain 3-0 in the final at MetLife.

How the format works

The thirty-two clubs are split into eight groups of four. Each team plays three group matches, the top two go through, and from there it is straight knockout to the final: round of 16, quarter-finals, semi-finals, decider. It is the same architecture as the men's World Cup before the expansion to 48, and it was chosen precisely because supporters already understand it without being told.

Who qualifies

Places are shared out by confederation, and the imbalance is impossible to miss: Europe takes more than a third of them. Within each confederation, the winners of the last four editions of the main club competition get in, and the remaining places come from a ranking calculated over that same four-year window.

In the draw, clubs are spread across four pots and teams from the same confederation cannot land in the same group. The exception is Europe, which can have up to two clubs per group: with twelve teams and eight groups, there was no way around it.

The money, which is the point

No explanation of the new Club World Cup makes sense without the prize figures. FIFA set aside a billion dollars to share among the thirty-two entrants, and Chelsea finished their run with 115.2 million, of which 40 million came from the final alone. That is more than many clubs earn by winning their own national league, and it is what turned a tournament Europe used to ignore into a competition nobody turns down.

What the Brazilians did at the first edition

Brazil sent four clubs, more than any country outside Europe, and the campaign produced South America's best result in recent memory. Botafogo beat Paris Saint-Germain 1-0 in the group stage through Igor Jesus, the first win by a Brazilian club over a European side in the competition in almost thirteen years, since Corinthians beat Chelsea in 2012. Fluminense went further: they knocked out Inter Milan in the round of 16, got past Al-Hilal in the quarter-finals and only stopped in the semis.

Why the change split the game

The tournament was not created by consensus. Player unions and European leagues objected to the calendar, already full before FIFA added up to seven matches in the middle of the year, in the window that used to hold holidays and pre-season. FIFA's answer was the frequency: held every four years, the Club World Cup does not weigh on every campaign. The market's answer was simpler and more effective: at those figures, the clubs went.

The next edition is set for 2029, and the discussion already under way is about expanding from thirty-two clubs to forty-eight, the same road the national-team World Cup took. If it happens, a tournament born in 2025 will have changed size before its second edition, which says a good deal about how fast club football is being redrawn.

In the end, the new Club World Cup solved an old problem with an old instrument. The question of who the best club in the world is never had a good answer, because the tournament meant to settle it was too small to be taken seriously. FIFA did not win the argument with arguments. It won with prize money, and suddenly everyone wanted the answer.