PSG vs. Chelsea: The Club World Cup final will be a playground for the uber-rich — and make them richer

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — On the doorstep of history here at the Club World Cup, Luis Enrique was explaining how Paris Saint-Germain got so good. They had just pummeled Real Madrid, 4-0. Spanish reporters wondered if the Parisians were “imbatable,” unbeatable. Perhaps not quite, but they have conquered France and Europe, and advanced to Sunday’s Club World Cup final; why? Because “we all work together,” as Enrique said. His players spoke about their “connection” and “collective effort,” and a shared “philosophy” instilled over the past two seasons, with “the team before everyone.”

Enrique, though, in an aside, mentioned the other reason.

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PSG, he said through an interpreter, is “a club where budget isn’t that much of an issue. We can hire the players that we need, so that they can play the way that we like.”

That, above all, is the story of PSG’s surge to the top of the soccer world. And it’s the story of Sunday’s final. For all the talk of the club’s shift away from megastars, which began when Enrique arrived in 2023 as Neymar and Lionel Messi departed, the club spent over $500 million that season on 11 new players. Since the summer of 2022, it has spent almost $1 billion on transfer fees alone. The only club that has spent more?

PSG’s opponent on Sunday, Chelsea.

The Club World Cup, in other words, has arrived at a final stage that looks an awful lot like a playground for the uber-rich. PSG is owned by Qatar Sports Investments, an arm of the Qatari government’s sovereign wealth fund. Chelsea is owned by a consortium of billionaires and an American private equity firm, Clearlake Capital. They rank No. 2 and No. 1 globally in transfer spend over the past three seasons — or two seasons, or four seasons, whichever time horizon you choose.

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The wealth is why they’re here. The money has purchased 20 of the 22 players expected to start Sunday’s final, plus several others who’ll come off the bench, plus several more who won’t be involved at all.

And no matter the result, more money will be the reward. Each club has already earned over $75 million in Club World Cup prize money, and likely over $100 million when including their appearance fees — what FIFA calls the “participation pillar.”

The Club World Cup, therefore, will follow and reinforce a pattern that defines modern soccer. The rich clubs buy and pay the best players; so they win; so they get richer, and buy more players, and everyone else gets left behind.

The billions behind PSG and Chelsea’s rise

Neither Chelsea nor PSG had had much success in Europe before the money arrived from overseas. When Qatar bought PSG in 2011, it had appeared in the Champions League only five times; when Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003, it had appeared in Europe’s premier club competition once.

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Money soon changed that. Both clubs became fixtures in the Champions League and forces domestically. In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Abramovich to sell Chelsea, but the new owners, led by American businessman Todd Boehly, simply took lucrative spending to a new level. They splashed around $350 million on transfers in less than three months. As their rivals wondered how the heck they could spend so much, five months later, they paid another $140 million for Enzo Fernandez, and $80 million for Mykhaylo Mudryk, and around $385 million in total that January.

They didn’t spend the money particularly well — which is part of why they kept on spending. They missed on, or at least overpaid for, Mudryk, Raheem Sterling, Wesley Fofana and others. On the field, their missteps showed. Results — and, by extension, prize money and revenue — suffered.

But they just kept going. They broke rules, and didn’t stop. Last week, UEFA, soccer’s European governing body, fined Chelsea around $36 million for the breaches, and imposed some restrictions on how much the Blues can spend going forward. Nonetheless, despite knowing they were under scrutiny throughout the 2024-25 season, they kicked off the 2025 summer by paying over $100 million for new players. Then, just last week, they paid some $150 million more for striker João Pedro and winger Jamie Gittens.

Pedro, six days after signing, propelled them into the final with two goals against Fluminense — whose 2024 revenue, in total, was less than Pedro’s transfer fee.

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PSG, on the other hand, has been less reckless. Its hit rate in the transfer market has been much higher. It has identified dynamic young players, such as João Neves, Désiré Doué and Willian Pacho, who jibed with Enrique’s system, grew within it, and helped fuel it to greatness. Some pre-Enrique signings — Fabián Ruiz for $26 million, Nuno Mendes for $47 million, Vitinha for $48 million — now look like bargains.

But money was still the prerequisite. And with so much at their disposal, both PSG and Chelsea have been able to buy their way out of mistakes or injuries. Of the $2.9 billion they’ve spent on players since the summer of 2022, around half — some $1.4 billion — bought players who didn’t appear in the Club World Cup semis or quarters or, in some cases, haven’t yet appeared for the club.

The rich get richer

They have spent in a different stratosphere than most other participants in this Club World Cup. Each has spent more on a single player than the entire Transfermarkt value of 16 of the 30 other squads. Many of those 16 have spent less than $100 million on transfers in their entire histories.

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Their spending did not equate to automatic wins. In fact, both Chelsea and PSG lost to Brazilian teams in the group stage. Several circumstantial factors, combined with the general randomness of soccer, closed the gap between the rich and the rest last month.

But by the end of the Club World Cup, money talked. And now, it will grow.

After prolonged negotiations with clubs and other stakeholders, FIFA, soccer’s global governing body and the organizer of this novel tournament, promised the European participants disproportionately large chunks of a $1 billion prize money pot. Less than half of that pot will be disbursed based on results over the past four weeks; the majority ($525 million) was apportioned by continent, and based in part on “commercial criteria.” In other words, the European clubs with the most prestige and commercial pull would bank more than twice as much as any non-European club based on those factors alone.

This was supposedly necessary to A) get the European giants onboard, and B) limit the impact on financial inequality within non-European domestic leagues, where even $9.55 million — the guaranteed payout to clubs from Africa, Asia and North America — is a scale-tipping fortune.

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But it will only worsen inequality in soccer globally. The 12 European teams will claim a combined $623 million of the $1 billion; the other 20 teams will get the remaining $377 million. The gap, over time, will continue to grow.

It is hardly a coincidence that two of the richest, Chelsea and PSG, will play for the inaugural title of this expanded tournament on Sunday. And will not be a coincidence if they contend for the next one, presumably in 2029.