"FIFA has created a tournament that feels genuinely novel -- hard indeed in a postmodern age -- with eclectic and often excellent football, a good balance of superstars and new talent, and, given the limited numbers partaking, relatively low barriers to hosting. This is a tournament with a world title at stake, which is held annually, and which seemingly almost every entrant has a tangible chance of winning," Asad Yawa commented in his review of the 2006 Club World Cup published at ohmynews.com.
"The significance of this is ... the Club World Cup can give FIFA some serious clout in the realm of club football. Up to now, it has watched nervously as the European football confederation, UEFA, has revamped and built up the Champions League to the point that its total revenues from that competition alone are around $600 million per season. Meanwhile, FIFA's annual income is startlingly dependent on the traditional World Cup: even in a non-World Cup year such as 2003, FIFA generated 59.2 percent of its total revenues of 712 million Swiss Francs from broadcast and advertisement rights for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. "
Citing an estimate in the January 2007 issue of World Soccer that "90 percent of all money pertaining to club football is in the European variant", he said the Club World Cup can both diversify FIFA's revenue streams and enable it to provide a counterpart to UEFA's dominance of club football. The TV deal for the 2006 World Club Cup is also "a sign that FIFA can reduce this share [as] 219 territories broadcast the competition, with 199 featuring live telecasts. In other words, the take-up for the tournament has been virtually universal ... In China alone, state broadcaster CCTV estimated that the 2006 World Cup was to have around 10 billion viewers cumulatively ... India's major cities turned into footballing hotbeds, with soccer receiving 185,000 column centimeters of editorial space compared to 57,000 for cricket in newspapers in the metropoli of Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai."
"The significance of this is ... the Club World Cup can give FIFA some serious clout in the realm of club football. Up to now, it has watched nervously as the European football confederation, UEFA, has revamped and built up the Champions League to the point that its total revenues from that competition alone are around $600 million per season. Meanwhile, FIFA's annual income is startlingly dependent on the traditional World Cup: even in a non-World Cup year such as 2003, FIFA generated 59.2 percent of its total revenues of 712 million Swiss Francs from broadcast and advertisement rights for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. "
Citing an estimate in the January 2007 issue of World Soccer that "90 percent of all money pertaining to club football is in the European variant", he said the Club World Cup can both diversify FIFA's revenue streams and enable it to provide a counterpart to UEFA's dominance of club football. The TV deal for the 2006 World Club Cup is also "a sign that FIFA can reduce this share [as] 219 territories broadcast the competition, with 199 featuring live telecasts. In other words, the take-up for the tournament has been virtually universal ... In China alone, state broadcaster CCTV estimated that the 2006 World Cup was to have around 10 billion viewers cumulatively ... India's major cities turned into footballing hotbeds, with soccer receiving 185,000 column centimeters of editorial space compared to 57,000 for cricket in newspapers in the metropoli of Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai."