England to host Club World Cup? Chelsea impact assessed by expert, FIFA set £750m target again

Club World Cup champions Chelsea could see the second edition of the revamped FIFA tournament staged in their own backyard.

The Club World Cup was the second honour of the BlueCo era but was wildly more lucrative than the first, the Europa Conference League. In total, Chelsea banked around £85m in prize money.

FIFA expanded the tournament to 32 teams for the first quadrennial version in the United States last summer, and reports suggest that they are considering going even bigger in 2029.

World football’s governing body is aiming to invite 16 extra teams to the next Club World Cup, as well as loosening the rules on the number of clubs allowed from single nations, potentially allowing more than two Premier League teams to participate.

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For Chelsea, whose success in the United States after thumping Paris Saint-Germain 3-0 in the final has significantly helped amid anxieties around UEFA’s financial rules, that would increase the odds of being at the competition again in 2029.

Exactly how money-spinning that event will be for participating clubs depends on a number of factors.

For one, the £750m prize money pot for the competition in the summer was largely funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund via an investment in tournament broadcaster DAZN. That led some to accuse FIFA of artificially inflating the value of the deal in exchange for influence from Saudi Arabia, who will host the international World Cup in 2034 and have been mooted as a potential host for 2029 too.

“The 2025 edition was seen as a hustle,” says University of Liverpool football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire, speaking exclusively to the Chelsea Chronicle.

“FIFA are desperate for normalisation and legitimacy on the back of that.”

Could that normalisation and legitimacy from staging the tournament in an established footballing nation, like England? Spain and Morocco are the favourites to stage the Club World Cup in 2029 but, according to The Guardian, FIFA are also mulling the possibility of hosting the tournament in England.

“If it takes place in England, will it sell out with 48 teams? I suspect not,” says Maguire, “but the matches involving Chelsea and three or four teams, as well as those involving Real Madrid, Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain and so on certainly would.

“But the issue is when you get Oceania’s best team against the second or third best team in Africa, there might be a novelty value, but it won’t be much more than that.

“Would traditional fans turn their noses up? Yes, but I think we underestimate the appeal of England to tourist fans. It then comes down to pricing. As we have seen with FIFA’s dynamic pricing, that can work for the organisation, if not for the fans.”

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