PSG and Chelsea in the Club World Cup final reflects the state of the game in 2025 – The Athletic – The New York Times

FIFA Club World Cup
There was a temporary exhibit in the lobby of Trump Tower this week, near the 60-foot waterfall, the gold-plated escalator and the gold-plated elevators, and it looked right at home.
FIFA’s new Club World Cup trophy was crafted in collaboration with luxury jeweller Tiffany & Co, which is based on the same block on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. It is plated in 24-carat gold — “prestigious, timeless,” says FIFA president Gianni Infantino, whose name appears on it. Twice.
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It is certainly eye-catching. Like some expensive toy, it comes with a key that, if turned three times, allows the trophy to be opened up and transformed — in this case from a shield into what FIFA calls a “multifaceted and orbital structure”. “Wow,” President Trump said when Infantino gave a demonstration in front of television cameras in the Oval Office in April. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
Trump is expected to join Infantino as part of the presentation party that will hand the trophy to the winning captain — either Paris Saint-Germain’s Marquinhos or Chelsea’s Reece James — after Sunday’s Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey (or “New York New Jersey” as FIFA appears intent on rebranding it).
Quite what the captain does with the trophy at that point — whether he lifts it, or opens it, or opens it and then tries to lift it in its expanded form — remains to be seen. But Infantino will have the moment he craves: fireworks, blaring music and Trump in attendance as the new world champions celebrate with the trophy and the winning club’s owners celebrate a windfall in the region of $114million (£84.5million).
This summer’s Club World Cup has been a strange experience. There has been a lot to take issue with, from the way it was crowbarred into a small gap in a horribly congested calendar to the commercially driven insistence on playing matches in scorching heat at the height of an American summer. The prize fund is only going to compound the issue of financial inequality in the game and then there’s the endless bombast from Infantino about how “the 32 best teams in the world” and their fans have created drama and atmosphere on an “epic”, “phenomenal”, “incredible” scale, beyond anything previously seen in club football.
“If you want the headline from the beginning — as we are in Trump Tower — the golden era of global club football has started,” Infantino declared on Saturday morning. “We can say definitely that this FIFA Club World Cup has been a huge, huge, huge success. After the final tomorrow, we will have (had) two or three billion viewers all over the world, watching the top, top, top-quality football featuring the best players in the best teams in the world.”
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The tournament has had its moments, but is this the showpiece final Infantino would have wished for the first version of the expanded tournament? Probably not; even if he were to look beyond his lifelong affinity with Inter, he might have preferred to see a final involving Real Madrid and/or one of the South American teams. The first would have been for commercial reasons, the second because it would have brought a global dimension, as well as a colour and vibrancy, that an all-European final lacks.

In many ways, though, a final between PSG and Chelsea seems to encapsulate the state of the game in 2025: a club owned by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund facing a club owned primarily by an American private equity firm. They are two of the three clubs with the biggest net transfer spend in world football over the past decade. (The fact that the other club in that trio is Manchester United, owned by an American family with a real estate empire, at least serves as a reminder that spending fortunes does not always guarantee success.)
Money makes the world go around — and no more so than in football. The sport did not anticipate the influx of American and Middle Eastern wealth it has seen over the past couple of decades, but it now actively lusts after that investment, whether direct or otherwise. FIFA, football’s world governing body, is at the centre of that equation.
This is a tournament on American soil, bankrolled by American and Middle Eastern investment. When, shortly after succeeding Sepp Blatter as FIFA president in 2016, Infantino floated the idea of an expanded Club World Cup with a $1billion prize fund for participating clubs, questions were asked about where that money was going to come from. The answer, to a large extent, is from the United States and the Middle East: big commercial deals with U.S. firms such as Coca Cola, Visa and Bank of America as well as with Qatar Airways and PIF (a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund) and an enormous television rights deal with DAZN, a U.S-based broadcaster that is now part-owned by SURJ Sports Investment, a subsidiary of PIF.
Infantino has been unapologetic for chasing Middle Eastern investment. In May, he arrived late at the FIFA Congress in Asuncion, Paraguay — to the disdain of delegates from UEFA, European football’s governing body — after spending the previous days at various summits and ceremonial events with Trump in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
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At the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh, the FIFA president spoke about the “huge unexploited potential” — even now — for investment from both countries, telling his audience: “Invest in the beautiful game! It will be the best investment you can make!”
Infantino claims interest in the Club World Cup has been off the scale. But it seems irrelevant to question whether a Qatari airline or a Saudi sovereign wealth fund has extracted value from sponsorship deals if those deals are less about “value” in the traditional sense than about cementing that nation’s government’s relationship with FIFA and enjoying whatever benefits might come of that.
Next summer, the U.S. will co-host the men’s World Cup with Canada and Mexico. Three-quarters of the games (78 out of 104) will take place in American cities and the whole affair seems to be shaping into a Trump-Infantino production. Trump has delighted his “good friend” and FIFA counterpart by becoming the chair of the 2026 World Cup task force — and this at a time when Trump signed executive orders restricting entry to the U.S. for nationals of various countries while imposing heavy trade tariffs on others, including their tournament co-hosts, Mexico.
Trump told reporters in March that political or economic tensions between the U.S. and its neighbours and co-hosts might make the World Cup “much more exciting”. Infantino, alongside him, nodded in agreement.
As for Saudi Arabia, it will host the 2034 men’s World Cup — despite the concerns raised by various groups about the kingdom’s human rights record — and its influence on FIFA and the football industry continues to grow. Infantino’s predecessor, Sepp Blatter, told German TV channel ntv this week: “We have lost football to Saudi Arabia. We offered it and they took it. Surprisingly, there is no opposition to this within FIFA.”
Football revolves around the prestige and profile of the biggest clubs in Europe, which import talent from all over the world but primarily from South America and Africa. But the football economy, increasingly, revolves around the U.S. and the Middle East.
Where any of this is leading is anyone’s guess. But in a decade that has already seen 12 of Europe’s biggest clubs try and fail to establish a breakaway ‘super league’, it is easy to imagine a scenario in which the game’s established structure comes under serious threat once more.
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The scene in the VIP section at Wednesday’s semi-final at MetLife (below) — Infantino, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, PSG chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi and Turki Al-Sheikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority — left you wondering just how four of the most influential figures in football in 2025 might proceed if, hypothetically, they felt they had the opportunity to change the game’s landscape to their design.
It is hard not to imagine that Infantino’s vision for the future goes much further than a 32-team tournament every four years when he has been talking about this tournament as a “big bang” and a “new era of club football”. At Saturday’s chaotic media event at Trump Tower, The Athletic asked the FIFA president if he might push for it to be played every two years. “In the future, we will see what it brings us. We will make it better,” he said, a vague answer that will cause consternation among traditionalists.
Infantino sounds like someone who is looking far beyond the game’s traditional structures and architecture, in which everything is built around national leagues. The football business has changed hugely — and some of us would say not for the better — over the first quarter of the 21st century. It threatens to change far more dramatically over the next 25 years.
He claimed the Club World Cup has broken all records when it comes to the revenue generated per match, saying that “no other club competition in the world today comes anywhere close”. Those enormous commercial deals have certainly helped at a time when the organisers have found themselves putting the “dynamic” into “dynamic pricing” by slashing ticket prices in a bid to minimise the number of empty seats in the knock-out rounds.
Whether the tournament has captured the imagination of the typical football fan — or, to generalise less, of the typical cross-section of football fans — is a different matter entirely. A Champions League or Copa Libertadores semi-final and final is an enormous event that stops people in their tracks and dominates conversations; a World Cup final even more so. Was the football world captivated when PSG tore Real Madrid apart on Wednesday? It didn’t feel like it. Will it be any different when PSG take on Chelsea on Sunday? It is hard to imagine so.
The Club World Cup has its showpiece event, one that promises to be illuminated by a PSG team that has taken its game to another level since the turn of the year, excelling under the stewardship of Luis Enrique. But whether Sunday’s final will represent a showpiece for the game, or merely for FIFA’s success in milking it, is another question.
In the post-match festivities, that key will be turned three times to unlock the trophy. Infantino might say it is symbolic of club football’s true potential being unlocked as part of this new “golden era” he has been talking about. But… oh, what’s that old saying? All that glitters is not gold.
 (Top photo: Cole Palmer and Ousmane Dembele at Rockefeller Center. Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
Before joining The Athletic as a senior writer in 2019, Oliver Kay spent 19 years working for The Times, the last ten of them as chief football correspondent. He is the author of the award-winning book Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football’s Lost Genius. Follow Oliver on Twitter @OliverKay

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