Why You Should Care About the Club World Cup (If Your Team or Rival Is In It)
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Remember with everything else in the news this week, there's always a sports angle.
We've got a full soccer takeover of the newsletter today (except for a few of the bullet points below). We've got the Club World Cup, some MLS labor issues with it, the regular World Cup, and a few thoughts about Welcome to Wrexham, which I'm a newcomer to.
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The vibes around the Club World Cup are not great.
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The first expanded, 32-team version of the tournament started last weekend with concerns about low ticket sales and low fan interest (viewership numbers don't seem to be available yet). In its old format, the European Champions League winner usually crushed the non-European competition, and there haven't been any good upsets yet. Admittedly, I've been traveling, so let me know if I've missed some absolute bangers—but the goals seem to be feast or famine, with two scoreless draws and one 10-0 pasting from Bayern Munich over Auckland City. The results so far probably aren't helping, and many fans already didn't care about a tournament with little prestige or historical relevance.
But there's one reason to care about how teams perform in the tournament: money.
FIFA has gone big with a $1 billion prize pool, with the winning team bringing home up to $125 million. Some of the money will go to players (more on that below) but a lot of it will go to the team itself, to be invested as they see fit—and the winner's prize money is more than all but a handful of the biggest transfer fees in soccer history.
Even if a big team like Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain wins, that money can go a long way toward bringing in a player who could transform the team next season (and beyond). The prize money is spread throughout the knockout stages with increasing returns per game the farther a team goes. The two teams losing in the semifinals will have still earned about $45 million, enough for a solid transfer target in Europe. If a non-European team can make a surprisingly deep run, they could earn an insane amount of money for their league. The $1 million prize for a draw in the group stage is still a lot of money for some of the smaller teams who have made the field.
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So if a team you love (or loathe) is in the tournament, it's worth watching for the monetary implications.
I never understood why I should care about sporting events that tout big-money prizes for the winner. NASCAR's All-Star Race, for example, is an exhibition race that gives $1 million to the winner. Even if my favorite driver wins, I'm not going to see any of that money, and it's not going to make him any better in real races.
FIFA, though, has given fans 1 billion reasons to care.
Sounding Off
Seattle Sounders players and fans are mad at the team's owner and MLS for not sharing more than $1 million (combined, per team) in Club World Cup prize money with players. The dispute has led to on-field protests and an angry confrontation with the owner. But instead of being mad at the owner and league, Sounders players should be mad at their union.
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The fight is over a section of the MLS Players Association's 2021 collective bargaining agreement with the league which, for tournaments not mentioned in the agreement, capped the players' portion of prize pools at $1 million. To be fair, the union did not know in 2021 that in March 2025 there would be three MLS teams competing in the Club World Cup for portions of a $1 billion prize pool. But the Club World Cup very much existed, and every year several MLS sides competed in the CONCACAF Champions League for a shot at participating. Plus, FIFA President Gianni Infantino had talked about expanding the Club World Cup as far back as 2016, and FIFA actually announced an expanded version of the tournament in 2019 (but that was supposed to take place in China in 2021, so it got scrapped due to the pandemic). The MLS Players Association very much could have negotiated for Club World Cup prize money in its collective bargaining agreement, but it didn't.
On Sunday night, the Sounders lost 2–1 against Brazilian side Botafogo in their opening match in the tournament. With their two remaining group stage games against European giants Paris Saint-Germain and Atlético Madrid, it seems likely the players won't have to worry about missing out on a lot more prize money.
If You Build It
June 11 marked one year until the start of the 2026 World Cup, five-plus weeks where "America will welcome the world" and "there will be millions of people coming"—so says Infantino. The major hitch in that plan is that the people now managing the U.S. immigration system are infamously not so fond of having millions and millions of foreigners coming across the border.
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That's why potential visa issues are apparently keeping World Cup organizers up at night, according to The Athletic's Adam Crafton (as stated in his colleague Adam Leventhal's excellent podcast documentary about the World Cup). The last two World Cup hosts, Russia and Qatar, offered ticketholders a streamlined visa process that gave out something called a Fan ID they could use to enter the country. No such visa process has been announced for the three 2026 World Cup host countries—yet. Without it, a lot of fans will be in a bind: The wait times for U.S. visa interviews are frequently over a year long. "The wait times for U.S. visa interviews in two Mexican cities are already in excess of 800 days, while it is 685 days in the Colombian capital of Bogota," as Crafton wrote in April 2024.
Certain fans might be entirely out of luck even if the Trump administration approves a streamlined Fan ID visa process. Iran, for example, qualified for the World Cup but is also on the administration's list of 12 countries put under a new travel ban. A further 36 countries could be added to the list, including several African countries with solid odds of qualifying for the tournament (such as Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Ghana).
One assumes the Trump administration would at the very least give team members and their staffs from those countries an exception to the travel restrictions. Haiti was given an exception for its team to play in the ongoing Gold Cup. But with someone as erratic as President Donald Trump, you never know.
Goodbye to Wrexham
I didn't hop on to the Welcome to Wrexham craze when it began, maybe because I already had rooting interests in European soccer (a couple big teams and various small teams). I've now dipped my toe into the waters and watched a few episodes of the ongoing fourth season—and I still don't really get it. It's not that funny? There are a bunch of subplots that aren't about team performance or players that I don't really care about. It's a semi-interesting look into important decisions for a growing team but the behind-the-scenes access isn't as deep as other sports documentaries.
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Maybe I just saw a too-small sample size, or maybe I missed the show at its peak in earlier seasons, but it's just not for me.
I can kind of see why someone might like the show if they had little to no exposure to European soccer before—that's basically how I was with Drive to Survive and Formula 1. But if you're already committed to a European soccer team, I'm not sure I see the appeal.
Replay of the Week
For whatever reason, amid the Club World Cup and also the U.S. Men's National Team playing in the Gold Cup, MLS is still ongoing. But that means we were lucky enough to have this happen.
That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real match of the weekend in Spain (where club soccer is also apparently still happening), Real Oviedo vs. Mirandés with a spot in La Liga on the line.
The post Why You Should Care About the Club World Cup (If Your Team or Rival Is In It) appeared first on Reason.com.
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