Empty seats are everywhere at the Club World Cup. But does this miss the real point? | Club World Cup 2025

IF there is a lesson to be learned from the club’s World Cup so far, the images of nothingness still generate hysteria. Empty seats – which seems to be a festival lesion on the football game, a tragedy representing plastic bankruptcy in American football and/or World Cup for the club, a issue that requires worrying coverage with eyebrows completely stressful – was common in the opening games of the competition. Observations (Incurred from This post is veryI followed. Social media soaked in panoramic photos from a nation of press boxes, and informs you incredibly that this image, is very obscene in its vacuum, was taken just 45 minutes before the start of the match – or (moments) even closer.

Why, fans, observers, journalists and other people who are watching these games simply, are interested? What is the scene of a large group of plastic folding chairs with no one in it raises our emotions? How long have we all became Clint Eastwood at the 2012 Republican National Congress?

Empty seats mean unrealized revenues from tickets, concessions, goods, parking lots, and exploitative fees, but these things do not affect our statement. The marketing strategy that demanded distinctive prices for these seats was misleading at best and laughing branching in the worst case, but it was not ours. There was a lot of enlarged promises about guaranteed sales, “the greatest scene in the club’s football history”, which includes “the best 32 teams in the world” made to look completely silly in the perception period – but we were not the ones who promised them. At most, how much we shared an empty seat in Club World Cup Sitting next to one.

However, the duration of the Zeitgeist contains a strange mixture of anxiety, sadness, and above all, ridicule. Empty seats are taken as a material sign FIFA He may care a little bit of games that take place in front of emotional fans, as they are much more concerned with the money that he gets from selling TV rights, advertising space, and other considerations – often to the sovereign wealth fund in the country that hosts the future World Cup, or the previous. In theory, empty seats prove that fans and atmosphere – things that make football what they are – have a secondary importance.

I would like to suggest that these criticisms, despite the right and real, miss this point. We are only talking about the seats here. Not all are empty, and many of them are in very large stadiums. So far, the club’s World Cup places were about 52 % on average, using attendance numbers as FIFA announced. (In fact, these numbers are likely to be more represented by the number of tickets sold or distributed instead of the heels in the seats, but at least give us an idea.

These are ugly numbers. If the professional club team (or several) are constantly playing against the stadiums that were half full or less, one may wonder whether they are playing in the right stadiums. If this dynamic looks familiar to you mysteriously, you may be a fans of MLS. The first American section started her life by living in the issuance of one week of this problem-a new competition that no one has known completely, as most teams play in the huge or total football soccer fields in which the appropriate crowds were made to look slim and in a way. She learned the league slowly but steadily her lesson – almost every one of his thirty teams plays in its intimate lands, and the largest of them in about 30,000. It is not a bond of continuous sales, but environments have improved significantly. It is a lesson that FIFA should learn, as they host this championship in the backyard of MLS. There were a lot of loud Brazilian fans at hand at the Metlife Metlife Stadium on Tuesday for a Fluminense tie with Dortmund, but the place of 84000 is still half full. It makes you wonder about the intensity of this occasion that may be on the road on the 25,000 -year -old sports stadium, the home of New York Red Bulls (which can be more easily accessible by public transport).

Countless factors affected the turnout. There are well -established fears of ice raidsAnd that may have kept the fans of immigrants – not documented or not – away from the field. For fans of travel, visa treatment times were a nightmare. In the case of teams such as Ulsan Hyundai, Orawa Red Diamonds and Mamelodi Sundowns, the competition is distant enough to make travel impossible. For local fans, many games are held in the middle of working days. And that without even entering into ticket prices, which started with hundreds of dollars and did not decrease except because the dynamic pricing model has started on the horizon.

It was seen in one direction, 22,137 who attended Chelsea against Lavak in Atlanta left 70 % of the stadium empty. In another way, thousands of Atlantanis (as well as Chelsea and LAFC fans) appeared despite all the mitigating factors mentioned above, in the middle of the Monday’s working day, for a game in a competition that seems to be no one knows what he is doing, including the MLS team that plays 3000 miles and only officially qualifies. I present to you, given all of this, the audience was a simple victory. Chelsea will play for fewer fans when they visit Court in Bournemouth next season in the Premier League.

Likewise, it may be celebrated that less than 35,000 came to watch Flangego Playing De Tunis later on that night in Philadelphia, or that 40,311 dealt with well -known traffic issues in Rose Bowl to watch Monerrey V Inter. These are not the promised Sellouts FIFA, but those promises, like many FIFA pride, were stupid. The clear enthusiasm in the crowds themselves tell the rest of the story.

When the crowd sizes embarrassed, the problem may be a problem of perception; From the exotic FIFA ability to get its own way. The World Football Ruling Authority allowed the luxury excesses of the World Cup – as is the case in that actual, which will be held next year – to overcome its vision of this tournament, and what is the club’s game.

The World Cup has prestige. In fact, the masses can guarantee that regardless of the teams you will see, they will see a silent moment in the modern history of the sporting stories of these countries; Perhaps a milestone in the life of the country itself. Being a more intimate club, even for the largest clubs in the world. It is a regular daily loyalty that does not simply fit with the maximum FIFA tendencies.

Perhaps for this reason the empty seats in these games have become a pivotal point – it is an uncomfortable reminder that the world of every club is very big.