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Frustration is growing among clubs globally at the extended wait for £185m of solidarity payments promised by Fifa on the back of last summer’s Club World Cup.
Clubs that did not participate in the tournament were promised a share of the sum, designed to ensure a proportion of the event’s funding was distributed throughout the football pyramid. If shared equally it would amount to about £50,000 for every top-flight club in the world but, more than seven months after the Club World Cup’s conclusion, there is no sign of the money and no timescale for its distribution. The Guardian understands Fifa is yet to determine how the money will be allocated.
There is no suggestion that the windfall will go unpaid but clubs in smaller leagues are growing particularly impatient. The £740m set aside as prize money is understood to have been released; the winners, Chelsea, are thought to have earned about £84m. In comparison the solidarity sum may seem a drop in the ocean but the cash injection would make a significant difference to those in less glamorous settings.
An executive from one of Europe’s smaller leagues told the Guardian there had been no clear answers about when their clubs will be paid despite continued inquiries. In environments where domestic television rights deals are increasingly precarious, and in certain cases nonexistent, a five-figure windfall has the potential to be a lifeline.
Numerous clubs, including some on other continents, have painted a similar picture. In Europe there is a perception that Fifa has dragged its feet on reaching a final formula for the payments’ distribution. On some occasions Fifa is believed to have postponed meetings on the topic. Fifa has been in dialogue for several months with the powerful European Football Clubs body, which reached an agreement last year for about 13% of Club World Cup revenue to be reserved for solidarity payments. In some quarters there is sympathy for Fifa, acknowledging the complexity and political sensitivity of the task.
One sticking point is that no formula has been determined for dividing the £185m between the six confederations, who were represented at the Club World Cup to wildly differing extents. In practice, clubs are highly unlikely to receive identical amounts. Additionally, most confederations do not have a mechanism for distributing such payments. Uefa has experience of handing out solidarity funds to clubs that do not qualify for the league phase of European club competitions and is likely to employ a similar formula when the final sums are known.
A source from the Union of European Clubs (UEC), which represents more than 140 non-elite clubs around Europe, said none of its members had received any information about when payments might be received. “UEC as an organisation has not heard anything and no member clubs we have consulted with have heard anything either,” they said.
The last-minute nature of Fifa’s funding deal for the Club World Cup is unlikely to have helped the process to run quickly. It was only in March, three months before the tournament, that the prize money and solidarity pots were agreed. That followed the £787m agreement with the Saudi-backed streaming platform Dazn, reached in December 2024, to air all the competition’s games free of charge.
Fifa was contacted for comment.
