Was attendance at this year’s FIFA Club World Cup truly that low?

Dominik Schreyer / Niclas Höppner - July 18, 2025

This year’s recent FIFA Club World Cup (CWC), the first to be held in the United States, has sparked debate: Was the event a great success—or a total disaster? An analysis from Professor Dominik Schreyer and Niclas Höppner from the WHU Center for Sports and Management shows that stadium attendance at the CWC was, despite all the rumor, not as bad as was claimed. However, specifically before the tournament began in mid-June, the media seemed to focus more on empty stadium seats than on who was going to win the tournament. Looking at the numbers, the researchers asked themselves how the CWC compared to other soccer events held in the US. What did the organizers behind the UEFA Women’s European Championships, held in Switzerland, do better to avoid empty seats? Analyzing the numbers shows that FIFA could have avoided certain mistakes ahead of the tournament.  

To put it plainly, FIFA overestimated stadium attendance demand: it opted to hold a considerable number of matches in larger stadiums that typically host NFL games and also set ticket prices rather high. As a result, seat supply did not meet the demand in a market where soccer is less popular than other sports, leading FIFA to cut prices and increase their marketing efforts. The media soon began reporting on the predictably low spectator turnout. And while some would say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, this media coverage notably did not help sell tickets.

But was turnout for the FIFA CWC really that bad?

Football or soccer? The complicated (American) market

According to data from Two Circles, a data-driven sports marketing agency, sports events in the American market attracted about 292 million attendees in 2024, a 3% increase over 2023. While this is an impressive number, about three out of four attendees went to watch baseball (35%), basketball (22%), or American football (20%). Soccer’s share? A mere 8%, or about 23 million tickets. And that represents the whole soccer market in the US. Breaking that down even further, only about 4%, i.e., every second soccer ticket sold, was for a Major League Soccer (MLS) match, averaging about 23,000 tickets last year. Even lower still, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) distributed, on average, about 11,000 tickets per match in 2024.

Putting things into context: Attendance-wise, CWC can be considered a success

Compared to both the MLS and NWSL figures, the turnout at FIFA’s CWC was significant, notably increasing as the tournament progressed. More specifically, FIFA distributed almost 2.5 million tickets over 63 matches. And even though this means that about 1.7 million seats, or about 40% of all seats remained empty, average attendance was close to 40,000 distributed tickets per match. Critics of FIFA’s CWC—and there seem to be plenty of them—emphasize that high ticket sales, on their face, do not equal physical turnout. For example, corporate tickets (e.g., for sponsors, or even free tickets) could result in significant no-show numbers, which cannot be accounted for with 100% accuracy.

However, even in a worst-case scenario with about 30% no-shows (a common rate among free ticket holders), physical admissions would still be about 28,000 tickets and, therefore, more than in MLS and NWSL, as well as in the Gold Cup, the continental soccer tournament for men’s senior national teams from North America, Central America, and the Caribbean. That latter competition managed to distribute about 25,000 tickets per match and was hosted in the US over the same period of time. Needless to say, these competitions also observe no-shows.

Still, despite considerable success attendance-wise, there is still the fact that organizers miscalculated demand for a new (or rather revised) tournament and failed to control the narrative of empty seats that arose early on.

A different approach: Protecting the growth narrative

But what would be a feasible alternative? Across the North Atlantic Ocean, in Switzerland, UEFA is currently setting an example of how things can be better with its Women’s Euro 2025. Even if you aren’t following the tournament, you certainly haven’t (and won’t) see the media buzzing about empty seats. And there’s a reason for that: UEFA, despite all the sport’s momentum in Europe, did not overestimate the hype surrounding women’s sports and opted for more appropriate, moderately sized venues. With fewer than 35,000 seats, Basel’s St. Jakob-Park is the largest stadium in the tournament. There are also two venues each supplying more than 25,000 seats in Bern and Geneva, and two in St. Gallen and Luzern each supplying fewer than 20,000 seats. Matches unlikely to attract strong demand will be held at the stadiums in Sion and Thun, each with fewer than 10,000 seats.

The result of this tactic? Breaking news about breaking records.

After 24 out of 31 matches played in the group stage of the tournament, UEFA distributed a total of 461,582 tickets, or 19,233 per match. This made the event the best-attended Women’s European Championship group stage in history. In fact, it only took 20 matches to smash the previous record aggregate for the group stage set in England in 2022, which sold 369,314 distributed tickets. The tournament also broke the attendance record for a group stage match not involving the hosts. Twice. That figure is now at 34,165 distributed tickets. And while these numbers are significantly lower than those of FIFA’s much-mocked CWC, its strong distribution of tickets in relation to venue capacity, shared by UEFA before the tournament even began, has sent a strong signal: Fans are hungry, and ticket demand generally exceeds supply. That is likely down to the fans’ fear of ticket scarcity and potentially missing out—and taking advantage of that fact, some would say, is the oldest marketing tactic in the book. Yet somehow, FIFA failed to act accordingly.