FIFA president Gianni Infantino was hoping to create quite the interesting legacy with his plans to expand the routinely ignored Club World Cup tournament, but this summer's iteration of his project has been making the headlines for all the wrong reasons and it started long before the first scheduled games in the United States kicked off.
Inter Miami's invitation to the tournament will be known by fans in the future as the Lionel Messi contract, with a self serving additional summer transfer window where Real Madrid paid Liverpool £10 million to release Trent Alexander-Arnold roughly 30 days earlier than he would have become a free agent, and Infantino himself appearing to hock the services of Cristiano Ronaldo around just so he could take part, it all very quickly began to get quite bizarre.
The plight of New Zealand part timers Auckland City facing off against Bundesliga giants Bayern Munich soon became a fresh talking point on day one, and there had already been than an undercurrent bubbling along of just how popular and well received the competition would be by audiences full stop, let alone the American one and with so many entertainment offerings available, how many fans would just switch off and spend their time gaming on casino games bitcoin as one of the many examples that are available.
With us now almost a full week into the competition and plenty of games having now taken place, it appears that we might now have an answer to those questions, and it seems that the tournament has certainly not generated the interest that Infantino was hoping for as we come to the end of the opening group stage matches.
16 games have taken place at this point, and nine stadiums have been used for those games, yet the combined attendance figure stands at only 56.8% of total capacity. 556,369 fans have attended these games so far, yet there have also been 423,004 empty seats despite the claims of late price discounts in an effort to combat the fears that a figure such as that might be reached.
That figure is itself somewhat misleading and despite some of the teams at play in this competition, half of the 16 matches so far have featured sub 50% attendance levels. As South African side Mamelodi Sundowns took victory over South Korean side Ulsan HD at Inter & Co Stadium in Florida, the attendance was almost non league levels totting up only 3,412, representing only 13.6% of the total capacity, and other games have been 17% full or even 20% full, which still is not great.
Even Chelsea only managed to pull 31% of available capacity at Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium when they faced Los Angeles FC in their game.
It is certainly not the look that Infantino would have wanted from his self sponsored attempt at a legacy, but equally it also raises additional concerns for the forthcoming FIFA World Cup next summer that will be shared with Canada and Mexico. The Club World Cup was always intended to be a trial event, or a dress rehearsal, for the prestigious international tournament as Infantino again focuses on expansion and a growing spectacle, and it leaves questions to be answered that FIFA would much rather have never been asked in the first place.
A FIFA statement in response to the figures pointed out that they were confident that they would rise as 'four of the five top selling group stage matches' were still yet to come, but trying to hide behind 'bigger clubs are yet to play' is a bit of a poor excuse to defend a tournament failure when it has just been expanded. A crowd of 80,619 for the Paris Saint-Germain win over Atletico Madrid shows what the fans want, but the competition make up will not provide that regularly until the latter stages, and it will likely be reflected in the prices as well.