The president of the International Football Federation (Fifa), Gianni Infantino, said Thursday in an interview with AFP that an enlarged Club World Cup would stimulate international competition between clubs.
“We are focusing on global competition in the Club World Cup, for example, to not only have one club from each confederation, but more participation, because we need to stimulate club football around the world”, a- he declared, on the sidelines of the World Club final between Bayern Munich and the Tigers this Thursday) in Doha.
“We have already decided that the new Club World Cup will include 24 teams from all continents,” he recalled.
We still have to find the right niche for the new Club World Cup with 24 teams.
This is obviously not an easy challenge at this time when everything is congested anyway.
If we have to wait another year, we will. ”
The calendar changed due to the health crisis
The calendar has indeed been significantly overhauled due to the coronavirus pandemic and health restrictions across the world.
In 2021, there will be two editions of the Club Mondial.
Qatar is currently hosting the 2020 edition, which was scheduled to take place in December and has been postponed for two months due to the coronavirus pandemic, while the 2021 edition is scheduled to take place in Japan in December.
A new Club World Cup with 24 teams, including eight from Europe, was due to take place in China this summer.
But the expanded competition will not start until a later date, after the one-year postponement of the Euro and Copa America, initially scheduled for 2020, in June and July of this year.
But both FIFA and UEFA are working behind the scenes to rewrite the club calendar, at a time when the top Europeans are tempted to launch their own “Superleague”, closed and very profitable.
Heated for several months in the press, with FC Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United among its supposed promoters, this project would siphon off a large part of the TV rights on which the more modest bodies and clubs live, widening the sporting gaps a little more. and financial.
Hence the attention paid to clubs by Fifa, long focused on its World Cup and therefore on selection football.
"The real challenge for the future will be the calendar of international matches, the balance to be found between the football of the selections and the football of the clubs which suffers even more now, during this period of Covid", pleads Mr. Infantino.
For its part, UEFA is preparing a new formula for the Champions League from 2024, with 10 matches per club in the group stage against 6 currently, which should inflate the financial fallout while saturating the players' program a little more. .
"If some countries have difficulty accessing vaccines, despite the efforts of the World Health Organization, we could then consider helping them concretely with projects targeted at the World Cup"
Gianni Infantino
With less than two years of the next World Cup, in 2022 in Qatar, the boss of Fifa admitted that the questions of health restrictions and vaccination could dominate the preparations for the tournament (November 21-December 18).
"We have to see how the situation will be then, it's very difficult to anticipate now what it will be," he noted.
We have two years to return to some sort of normalcy. ”
While Qatar announced last week that its World Cup will take place with stadiums open at 100% of their capacity, Mr. Infantino is ready for FIFA to provide concrete help, particularly in terms of vaccination to allow the presence of supporters foreigners.
"If some countries have difficulty accessing vaccines, despite the efforts of the World Health Organization, we could then consider helping them concretely with projects targeted at the World Cup," said Mr. Infantino.
"But once again the tournament is in two years, I believe and I really hope that all those who want to be vaccinated will be (...) There is no such thing as 100% safety, but we can do a lot of it. bring closer ”, he concluded.
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