Manchester City and Chelsea forced to field strongest teams in Club World Cup

Manchester City and Chelsea will be obliged to field their strongest teams throughout next summer’s FIFA Club World Cup – while still having to release players for international duty immediately before it.

The new 32-team event is scheduled to take place in the United States between June 15 and July 13 and has been the catalyst for a legal complaint against FIFA by European leagues and unions, who believe football’s global governing body has abused a dominant position over the scheduling of the tournament and by failing to consult them over the wider international calendar.

Leagues are concerned about the impact of the summer tournament on their own events, chiefly how players will be able to take a full three-week break and then go through a proper pre-season before the 2025-26 campaign begins next August.

Leagues’ concerns will now be heightened after the Club World Cup regulations published on Tuesday confirmed that, as part of participation agreements, clubs must field their strongest teams “throughout the tournament”.

Last month, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola said his club had asked for domestic matches to be postponed at the start of next season to accommodate their return from the Club World Cup, but that the Premier League had refused.

Sources close to the league highlighted at the time that this was precisely the sort of dispute between a league and a club that FIFA’s scheduling was always likely to create.

One of Chelsea’s star men, Cole Palmer, has been left out of their squad for the Conference League first phase this autumn with the club’s marathon schedule in mind.

The Club World Cup starts on June 15, but Chelsea will have to release international players like Palmer for the June national team window which runs from June 2 to 10.

Interestingly though, participating clubs will be able to refuse to release players for international duty during the competition under an exemption to FIFA’s usual rules.

The only tournament set to be played next summer which would normally be covered by this rule is the Gold Cup, which involves teams from North and Central America plus the Caribbean island nations. The Africa Cup of Nations had been due to be played next summer but will now begin in December 2025.

Clubs will be allowed to include up to 35 players in their final Club World Cup squad list, with 26 named for each match day. There will then be an in-tournament ‘window’ between June 27 and July 3 where players whose contracts are expiring can be replaced, and up to two new summer signings can be added to the existing 35-man squad. A maximum of six changes can be made during that window.

One way in which players are understood to be looking to raise awareness of welfare issues connected to the tournament is to potentially boycott their media and marketing obligations. Doing so would put them in breach of the tournament regulations, which oblige clubs to ensure players and staff attend all such events.

The display of any political, religious or personal messages or slogans of any nature in any language or form by players and officials is also prohibited under the regulations.