The Club World Cup has undergone a cataclysmic shift starting with this summer’s edition, expanding from seven teams to 32 while using the previous World Cup format. Games will be played over the course of a month The new tournament has brought intrigue — although ticket sales have been slower than expected, some games are already commanding prices of well over $100 for the cheapest seat — but also consternation, as the winner will have to play an additional seven games over the course of the month on top of the grueling continental calendar.
The potential blowback became clear from the tournament’s inception, with Manchester City midfielder and 2024 Ballon d’Or winner Rodri noting last September that the players might consider striking because of the physical toll imparted by the additional games. This week, the Seattle Sounders, who won the CONCACAF Champions League in 2022 to punch their ticket to the tournament, made global headlines by donning shirts saying “Club World Cash Grab” prior to their Sunday match against Minnesota United to protest what they perceived to be an unfair split of the prize money.
The prize money in question is massive. The entire tournament has a purse of $1 billion, with $525 million handed out to teams for their participation and an additional $475 million being disbursed based on teams’ performance. Every CONCACAF participant will earn a minimum of $9.55 million, an amount that represents some 15.3% of the Sounders’ total squad value. While that money will undoubtedly help Seattle invest in its facilities and its squad, a maximum of $1 million will go to the players, as laid out in the previous Collective Bargaining Agreement, signed in 2021.
Split between the squad’s 28 players, each individual Sounder’s payout would be $35,700. Given that the league’s average annual salary is $594,390 per season, that number isn’t entirely insignificant, but it pales in comparison with the minimum $8.55 million that the club’s owners will pocket. It also lags far behind Real Madrid, as the Galacticos have reportedly pledged to give each player $1 million if they win the tournament. Given Madrid’s strength — it is currently a +400 favorite to win at DraftKings Sportsbook — there’s a fair chance that a player like Kylian Mbappé, who already makes some $35.6 million per season, will receive a significant financial windfall. UEFA clubs will be given an automatic participation prize between $12.8 million and $38.19 million as is, and unlike in the MLS, their player prize allocation will increase with performance.
MLS players knew that the tournament would be expanded during negotiations, given that the new format was agreed to and announced in 2019, although the slot allocation and prize money hadn’t been agreed to at that point. No MLS teams had confirmed their place at the time, and Mexican teams had dominated the CONCACAF Champions League for 16 years straight, but in retrospect, it was a shortsighted decision to lock in the maximum payout at the time.
Given that the current CBA runs through 2027, the allocation won’t change until then, but if the MLS Players Association can continue to exert pressure on league executives, it’s possible that the next CBA will increase the pool for any possible participating clubs in the 2029 Club World Cup, which will take place either in Australia and New Zealand, Spain, Morocco, and Portugal, or once again in the United States. Four clubs have already punched their tickets to the tournament — France’s Paris Saint-Germain, Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ahli, Egypt’s Pyramids, and Mexico’s Cruz Azul — but it’s definitely possible that there could be an American representative too. MLS sides have made the final of the CONCACAF Champions Cup in each of the past four seasons.
