FIFA president Gianni Infantino has announced that the Club World Cup will be expanded to 32 of “the best teams in the world” from 2025.
Infantino has said: “As you will remember, we had agreed a few years ago to have a new men’s Club World Cup with 24 teams. This should have taken place in 2021 [but] was postponed because of Covid.
The new men’s Club World Cup will therefore take place in 2025 and will feature 32 teams, the best teams in the world. Of course, the details of that still need to be discussed and agreed, but the 32-team tournament will go ahead, making it really like a World Cup.”
Meanwhile, the current World Cup format, in place since 1998 which sees 32 teams drawn into eight groups of four, is also set to change at the expanded 48-team tournament in four years’ time with the FIFA Council choosing in 2017 for the nations to be split into 16 groups of three.
