Next summer, the United States will play host to an event that may define the legacy of FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino.
The Club World Cup, featuring 32 men’s teams gathered from leagues across the globe, is Mr. Infantino’s signature innovation, a competition he is so wedded to that his name appears on the newly created championship trophy not once but twice.
The tournament will take place in June and July in stadiums around the United States and is an attempt to deliver on Mr. Infantino’s oft-quoted catchphrase about making soccer “truly global.” It is his ambition to create a quadrennial club tournament that will grow into one of sports’ tent-pole events and endure long after he leaves office.
But despite Mr. Infantino’s high hopes, there is no guarantee that the tournament will be a success. Obstacles and missteps have blighted the path to the first game, and a huge uncertainty over its funding continues, even as a draw for the event is set to take place in Miami on Dec. 5.
In Europe, leagues and the global players’ union have filed lawsuits over what they say are Mr. Infantino and FIFA’s unilateral moves to add more events to an already congested global calendar that risks the health of players. Fans have also expressed dismay at how, in an effort to generate interest, FIFA appeared to have found a way to secure a place for Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami squad, eliminated from the Major League Soccer playoffs in the opening round. That happened despite Mr. Infantino’s insistence that the tournament would be the most merit-based in the world. But some of the biggest concerns persist around the event’s business model.
With less than a year to go before the tournament, FIFA, which has kept its revenue projections guarded, has started to share some of the details with a broader circle of officials and some of the 32 participating teams. Those include some of Europe’s biggest, like Real Madrid, which have demanded significant eight-figure fees in addition to prize money to appear.
FIFA must balance the needs and demands of those top European teams with competitors from less heralded soccer regions like the Middle East and Africa, ensuring the payouts reflect both the stature of the squads and its promise that the tournament is meritocratic and truly global. About 10 percent of the tournament’s income must be used for so-called solidarity payments for FIFA’s members and nonparticipating clubs.
The cost pressure from the clubs’ prize money demands is separate from the amount of money needed to stage a world-class, monthlong event in the United States, which FIFA had initially estimated to be $1.2 billion.
In the most recent updates, officials said they had budgeted for cost savings that would cut the expenditure to between $1 billion and $800 million, leaving a projection of at least $1 billion in net income, money that could be used to pay the participating clubs.
That profit is assuming FIFA hits commercial targets that defy the expectations of most analysts and industry experts. FIFA has told stakeholders that the Club World Cup will generate $800 million in media rights, and between $1 billion and $1.2 billion in partnership and sponsorship sales, as much as four times estimates.
However, several experts who have either worked with FIFA or bought rights from the organization estimated that the entirety of the competition, including commercial and broadcast rights, was worth more in the range of $500 million to $700 million.
“There is a lack of confidence in the market toward the tournament,” said Simon Thomas, a former chief commercial officer at FIFA who was hired by Mr. Infantino. “For a long time, sponsors and broadcasters didn’t believe in the tournament — they were skeptical whether it would happen. Maybe with more time, a marketing plan and visible commitments by the clubs, they would have jumped on board earlier. But there was no such communication. Which makes it hard to go and sell it in a short space of time now.”
FIFA was forced to start a late bid to sell the media rights this year after plans for Apple to broadcast the tournament globally failed because the American technology company did not agree with Mr. Infantino’s valuation.
“The interest from the market is very strong,” FIFA said in a statement, adding that it expected its sponsorship program for the tournament to be “fully sold out.” It did not comment on media rights sales or its forecasts.
FIFA said club executives “have been extremely supportive of the tournament and its competitive nature.” That characterization appears to be at odds with comments from some of the biggest names in the sport. This past weekend, Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Pérez, complained about the risk of injury for his already overworked players.
“Lack of rest affects players’ careers,” he said, a few hours before the star player Vinicius Junior injured his hamstring. “FIFA has created a Club World Cup that will deprive players of their usual rest.”
FIFA only recently announced which stadiums would host games, and just two sponsors have signed up so far, including Anheuser-Busch InBev, a longstanding FIFA World Cup partner, which was announced on Monday. A delayed, and truncated, call for bids for the media rights was said not to have yielded the type of income FIFA needed to meet costs, with some major European broadcasters opting not to participate at all.
“FIFA will need to get creative and make up the difference from other sources,” Mr. Thomas said.
The organization cannot tap its $4 billion reserves to meet any deficit after Mr. Infantino promised members of his governing council at their most recent meeting that he would not use those to plug any deficits.
That has led to growing speculation that FIFA will rely on his relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has fast become the biggest spender in international sport, to enable Mr. Infantino’s project to succeed.
A week after the Club World Cup draw in Miami, FIFA will host a virtual meeting of its 211-nation membership, where it will select the hosts of the 2030 and 2034 World Cups. Saudi Arabia, whose hosting had been quietly championed by Mr. Infantino, emerged as the only bidder for the 2034 World Cup after a much criticized switch in procedure announced by FIFA last year.
Saudi companies have been buying sponsorship agreements across world soccer in anticipation of that vote, and the national oil company, Aramco, inked a huge deal to team up with FIFA in April.
The competition has been Mr. Infantino’s pet project since early in his tenure, which began in 2016. He faced a major backlash from European officials on the FIFA board in 2018 when he told them that he had agreed to a $25 billion deal to sell several editions of the new tournament and another national team competition to an entity he refused to identify. That group was later found to be led by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate.
That deal would eventually collapse amid the threat of mutiny, but Mr. Infantino received the support he needed to announce that there would be an inaugural tournament in China in 2021, only to be thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic. For FIFA’s commercial team, that came as a relief. Mr. Infantino would have needed to raise $2 billion at the time, Mr. Thomas said.
The pressure is now on Mr. Infantino for the tournament to be a success.
“If these numbers aren’t right, there is going to be such significant blowback,” said Chris Lencheski, a founder of SKI Partners, a sports and media advisory firm, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
Perhaps enough, he said, “to bring down careers.”
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