Africa-Press – Botswana. FIFA on Sunday announced the schedule and detailed information of the revised FIFA Club World Cup, whose first edition will take place in the United States in 2025.
The FIFA Council met Sunday at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia ahead of the 2023 FIFA Club World Cup semifinals, to make several key principles of the new 32-team event, which will be held from June 15 to July 13, 2025.
Unlike the current annual Club World Cup format, the new structure sees the tournament take place only once every four years. Clubs qualify for the tournament with new standard rankings, which award three points for a win and one point for a draw as usual, as well as three points for progress to each stage of the continental competitions of five confederations, except Europe.
European clubs have a more complicated methodology, which counts two points for a win and four points for qualification in the group stage of the UEFA Champions League.
“With the objective of ensuring the highest quality possible based on sporting criteria over the most recent four seasons, starting from the group stage of the confederation’s relevant premier club competition, and incentivizing the result of every game in the respective tournament, the following methodology for the new standard ranking was approved,” a FIFA statement revealed.
The 2025 tournament will feature 12 teams from Europe, six from South America, four each from Asia, Africa and North & Central America, one from Oceania and one extra team from the host nation.
The group stage of the tournament is composed of eight groups of four teams per group playing in a single-game round-robin format, with the top two teams per group progressing to the round of 16.
A direct single-match knockout stage starts from the round of 16 to the final, and no third-place play-off will be held.
In addition to the revised Club World Cup, FIFA also announced the formation of a new annual global club competition, to be known as the Intercontinental Cup.
Similar in structure to the current Club World Cup format, the Intercontinental Cup will feature each confederation’s continental title winners against each other.
The UEFA Champions League winners will be given a bye to the final, to face the winners of an intercontinental play-off between clubs from the other confederations.
It was also announced that Chile will host the 2025 FIFA Under-20 World Cup, and Poland will stage the 2026 FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup.
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