ENJOY THE GAME

NO ONE ASKED FOR THIS: THE CLUB WORLD CUP 2025

KLAUS BREITSTIEL

June 30, 2025

Some tournaments are born out of legacy. Others are born out of love. The 2025 Club World Cup was born out of a marketing meeting. It pretends to be football but feels more like a PowerPoint presentation with goal celebrations. Still, for those of us who remember what the game can be, this bloated spectacle offers a strange kind of gift: a chance to look back. To trace what changed—and what quietly vanished, while no one was paying attention.

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The 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, taking place right now in the United States, is not a tournament. It’s a logistics spreadsheet that thinks it’s a summer blockbuster. A PowerPoint deck in boots. Thirty-two teams, sixty-three matches, a billion dollars in prize money, and not a single reason for any of it to exist, beyond the vague idea of content strategy. This isn’t football. It’s a simulated version of football, designed by someone who’s watched too much Drive to Survive and thinks emotional investment is just a matter of distribution.

32 teams. 8 groups. Endless drama. Group G alone could bankrupt your sleep schedule.

I love football. That’s the problem. I love it the way you love something that used to mean something. I love it like a song you heard as a teenager, one that made you feel bigger than your room. I grew up watching matches that weren’t optimized, that crackled with bad camera angles and uneven commentary, but felt real, full of tension, with stakes you couldn’t name but felt in your throat. I’ve rearranged weekends around kickoff times. I’ve shouted at screens. I’ve believed in stoppage-time miracles. And now, watching this bloated simulation march across the summer like a product launch, I feel something close to grief. I remember the Club World Cup when it was a goofy little December tournament—UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) versus CONMEBOL (South American Football Confederation), with an occasional wild tackle and the ambient soundtrack of jet lag. Nobody cared, but at least it knew what it was. Now it thinks it’s the Champions League. It thinks it’s the World Cup. It thinks it’s important.

Today, Real Madrid played a team from a league where the match ball is still stitched by hand. And they’re not alone. This tournament is stacked with clubs from places most fans couldn’t find on a map—teams with unfamiliar crests, playing in leagues that rarely make it to the group stages of continental competitions, let alone a global broadcast. Some are part-timers. Others have never played a match outside their region. They arrive jet-lagged and overawed, tasked with performing their role in the script: to be noble in defeat, to smile in tunnel photos, to make the branding look diverse. These aren’t Cinderella stories. They’re filler content. Everyone just sort of lets it happen. The players jog. The fans squint into the sun.

If football had a boy band, this would be the poster—featuring Lionel, Kylian, Erling, and the rest of the tour bus

This isn’t a calendar anymore. It’s a punishment loop. Players bounce from club to country and back again like diplomats with carry-ons full of compression sleeves. The season never ends. Preseason tours in Southeast Asia, the UAE, and then the Nations League. The Euros. The Copa. The Gold Cup. And on, and on, and on. Erling Haaland looks like he’s running through wet concrete. Jude Bellingham, barely out of his teens, already plays like someone managing a long-term injury—pacing himself through matches with the weary intelligence of a player twice his age. Vinícius Jr. limps from fixture to fixture, not even pretending to recover. These are players in their prime, or just before it, genetically blessed, surgically optimized—knees rebuilt like vintage Porsches, hamstrings managed like hedge funds, and yet, still visibly exhausted. They carry GPS trackers, have teams of nutritionists, and spend more time in cryo-chambers than most astronauts. And yet their legs betray them, their expressions flatten, their movements dull. They aren’t just tired. They’re spent in advance.

Football used to be seasonal. It’s not anymore. It’s a condition now—permanent, uninterrupted. A feedback loop of heat maps and hydration protocols. There’s no time for joy. Just recovery windows and sponsor duties.

63 matches, 12 cities, and 1 poor intern tasked with tracking the ball’s mileage

Qatar 2022 shattered what was left of the old calendar—and old football, for that matter. A World Cup in November and December. The leagues stopped. The world melted. And then we just . . . moved on. We accepted it. That’s the terrifying part. Once you’ve broken that seal—moved football’s holiest ritual to suit an air-conditioned autocracy—you’ve admitted that nothing is sacred. The Club World Cup slots in perfectly. It doesn’t disrupt the season. The season is the disruption.

Nothing like a quick costume change before lifting the most important trophy of your life

And then there was the idea of the Super League. The closed shop of elite clubs, unveiled with a website and some accidental honesty. A boardroom coup in a branded hoodie, pretending it was fate. FIFA said no. UEFA said no. Fans lit flares and screamed outside stadiums, and in one of football’s rare moments of collective clarity, the thing imploded in less than forty-eight hours. But the idea never died. It just changed clothes. The Club World Cup is the same thing, just wearing a badge and a FIFA lanyard. A few legacy clubs, protected matchups, and global exposure without consequence. No relegation. No real risk. Just a festival of familiar faces and soft landings. A competition designed to look competitive while making sure no one gets hurt. No more than a prolonged, choreographed handshake.

The new Champions League format isn’t helping. Starting in 2024, the group stage became a “league phase” with thirty-six teams, each playing eight random opponents, instead of a coherent group. It’s more games, more broadcast hours, more branded nights of football that feel like admin. The stakes are murky, the schedule a mess, and the drama algorithmic. It’s expansion dressed up as innovation, a competition trying to inflate itself into relevance by stretching thin what little tension remains.

The organizers say the Club World Cup is for the fans. But the tickets cost upward of $2,000, and the live kickoff times are set for viewers in the time zones of New York, London, Dubai, Shanghai, and Tokyo—not the people baking in plastic seats somewhere in Florida. They say it’s the future. But the future, apparently, is a branded tunnel walk set to a Spotify playlist, with a drone shot and a QR code.

Everything is monetized. Players are channels. Matches are reels. Goals come with three angles and a hashtag. There are TikTok walk-ins and pre-match content drops. Football is no longer watched; it’s scrolled. The game itself is just the raw material for branded moments.

You don’t support a club. You subscribe to one. DAZN wants you to stream it. TNT and Channel 5 want your attention. Amazon and Apple missed the deal, not because they didn’t want football, but because the rights had already been sold. It’s not about fans. It’s about market share. Football has been flattened into vertical video. The tribal, stupid, beautiful chaos has been filtered and optimized into something that always loads but never lands.

$1 billion to stream the tournament. Somewhere, Netflix just drop-kicked a remote.

And something’s gone missing. You can feel it. The memory. The myth. The sense that football, at its best, could still surprise you. That a team with a secondhand bus and a borrowed physio could take down a giant on a cold, rainy night in their home stadium. Like Leicester, who didn’t just win the league—they broke the odds table. In 2016, with 5,000-to-1 odds, they did the unthinkable: They turned a relegation-fighting squad into champions of the Premier League. No oil money. No global strategy. Just smart buys, collective belief, and Jamie Vardy drinking Red Bull before kickoff. It wasn’t supposed to happen—and that’s why it mattered.

Jamie Vardy drinks Red Bull on the bench. Your start-up drinks Red Bull and still doesn’t hustle like this.

Or Ajax in 2019: a bunch of fearless kids on borrowed time knocking out Madrid and Juve with nothing but power play and belief. Porto 2004, a squad of unknowns led by a young José Mourinho knocked out giants and won the Champions League—not by outspending anyone, but by outplaying everyone. It was the last time a club like that crashed the gates. And maybe the last time they’ll be allowed to. Deportivo’s four-goal resurrection against Milan—a game that made no sense, and that’s exactly why it mattered. In April 2004, after losing 4–1 in the first leg, they came back to beat the reigning champions 4–0 in the second. No script, no safety net. Just wild belief, in front of a home crowd that couldn’t believe what it was witnessing. These weren’t just upsets. They were ruptures in the system. They weren’t designed for engagement. They weren’t streamed. They were lived.

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney saved the club, yes. But can they name Wrexham’s starting 11 from 1978?

Let us not forget Wrexham, the football legends of the last few years. The Welsh club that became a Netflix-ready fairy tale, complete with two celebrity godfathers—Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney—casting spells in the form of sponsorships, stadium upgrades, and global streaming rights. What was once a struggling lower-league team is now a kind of sporting stage play, watched in bars from Burbank to Bangkok. It’s another Cinderella with better lighting and deeper pockets. But the boots still get muddy, the wind still howls across the Racecourse Ground, and the players—at least for now—still remember what it felt like before the red carpet was rolled out. Wrexham is the story of grit in gloss, a reminder that football’s magic doesn’t die when it’s televised; it just gets subtitled.

The Club World Cup isn’t the disease. It’s a symptom. It’s what happens when you forget what the point was. When football becomes something you deliver rather than something you feel. When the goal is reach, not risk. And when everything becomes content, nothing becomes memory.

Because football was never about scale. It was about heartbreak. About something impossible happening in the ninety-first minute.

And here I have to confess something—something that still throws me, all these years later. I’m a Bayern fan. And I remember that night: May 26, 1999. The Champions League final. Bayern leading Manchester United 1–0 in the ninetieth minute. Holding on. Controlling the game. Almost there. Then: ninety-first minute—Teddy Sheringham. Ninety-third minute—Ole Gunnar Solskjær.

The moment Ole slid into history—and Bayern’s nightmares

Just like that, the trophy slipped through Bayern’s fingers. Not because United were better, but because they believed, for two more minutes.

That wasn’t content. That was chaos. That was pain. That was football.

And that’s what we risk losing—not the structure, not the show, but the soul. It was about not being able to explain why you cared—and doing it anyway. It can still be that. But not like the Club World Cup 2025.

Klaus Breitstiel was born in Heusenstamm, near Frankfurt, in 1975. He played one forgettable season for Offenbacher Kickers—mostly from the bench, though he still claims an assist that no one else remembers. He was briefly scouted by 1. FC Kaiserslautern until a hamstring injury and an offer to play for a second-tier Brazilian team derailed both his form and his focus. He is now the stadium announcer at Wormatia Worms, where he reads out substitutions like they are tragic.

Cover image: Looks like Saturn married a vinyl record and gave birth to a trophy. Football’s most cosmic prize.