You know, you watch the FIFA Club World Cup on TV every December, and you just gotta ask: Why is it always looking so empty? Like, seriously empty? It’s supposed to be the best club team from every continent, but half the time it looks like a pre-season friendly in a dodgy stadium. I got fed up with the usual baloney answers and decided to actually dig into what’s happening on the ground.
My journey into this mess, honestly, started with a bit of my own life falling apart, which is usually how the best blog posts start, right?
The Realization That Travel Is a Gigantic Rip-Off
I was working a soul-crushing job a couple of years back. I mean, the kind of place where you put in 80 hours a week and they call you “dedicated.” I finally earned enough favor for a huge chunk of PTO. I booked everything: flights, accommodation, match tickets. This wasn’t for the CWC, mind you, it was for the Champions League Final in Madrid, the absolute pinnacle. I spent a year saving up for this one trip.
Everything was set. I walked into the office on the Tuesday before my Friday flight, and my boss, the biggest snake I’ve ever met, called me into his office. He didn’t even make eye contact. He just handed me a slip and said they were “restructuring” the department and my role was redundant. Canned me. Just like that. Two days before the biggest trip of my life, which he knew about, he had me gone. I found out later he just hired his nephew for half my salary.
I was stuck. Non-refundable everything. I tried to sell the tickets, the flights—everything was locked down, restricted, or just worthless to anyone else. It was thousands of dollars down the drain. My account was empty. I was sleeping on the couch, staring at the ceiling, wondering how I was going to pay the rent, let alone afford a plane ticket to another continent ever again.
That experience, being completely stranded by the economics of global sport and travel, is what kicked off this whole investigation. I spent the next two months, basically unemployed and stewing, reading every single thing I could find about how clubs and fans afford to just show up to these tournaments. Specifically, the Club World Cup, because that one is held in the most random, expensive places.
Digging Into the Data and the Whys
I started pulling attendance numbers. I didn’t care about the final—every final is packed, naturally. I cared about the quarter-finals, the semi-finals involving the Asian or African champs, and especially the dreaded 3rd-place playoff. And man, the numbers were grim.
Here’s the hodgepodge of reasons I found, which I’ll break down into what I call the “Four Killer Logistical Screw-Ups:”
- The Host City Disconnect: FIFA tries to sell this thing to the highest bidder. That often means a place where football isn’t the main deal, like the UAE or Qatar. The locals who do attend don’t have a vested interest. They show up for a major European club (Real Madrid, Liverpool), and if that club isn’t playing, they stay home. The games between, say, the Mexican team and the Egyptian team? Ghost towns.
- The Timing Nightmare: It’s always held in December, right in the middle of the European season. The European clubs don’t want to be there—it messes up their domestic league schedule. It’s also awful timing for traveling fans. No one has vacation time left; they just blew their PTO on Christmas holidays.
- The Fan Logistics Fail: For the actual, hardcore fans from South America, Africa, or Asia who have a deep passion for their club, the cost is catastrophic. My experience trying to recover money from a canceled trip was child’s play compared to what they face. They have maybe two weeks’ notice about their club qualifying. They have to arrange flights to an expensive, usually non-football-centric host country (like Japan or UAE) during peak holiday season. They simply can’t afford it.
- The Prize Problem: The tournament structure itself is a joke for the non-European teams. The European team gets a bye to the semi-final. The African or Asian champion has to play two or even three games just to get to that point. The prize money for the non-finalists is peanuts compared to the cost of travel and the disruption to their own domestic season. It just doesn’t feel like a high-stakes, important tournament until the final whistle.
It all came back to my own experience: The barrier to entry for international football travel is astronomical, and the CWC throws every single difficult, expensive obstacle in the way. It’s a tournament designed by accountants for TV viewers, not for the people who actually sing in the stands.
So, the attendance is low because FIFA basically makes it impossible for the actual fans of the teams involved to show up, and the host country fans only care about the big names. It’s a logistical hodgepodge, stitched together with zero thought for the supporters. That’s the real reason, and I learned it the hard way when I lost everything on a cheap flight to a different final.