Benfica qualified for the 2025 Club World Cup

Benfica has qualified for the new FIFA Club World Cup, which will take place between June 15 and July 13, 2025, in the United States of America. The presence of the Eagles in the inaugural edition of the competition was confirmed on Sunday, December 17, at the FIFA Council, where the criteria used to define the 32 participants were unveiled.

With the champions of the most important competitions in each confederation directly qualified, world football's governing body established a performance ranking of the last four years to award the remaining places: three points for a win, one point for a draw and three points for each qualification in the knockout stages of those respective competitions. However, in a decision taken exclusively for the 2025 edition, European clubs were left out of the equation.

Since three full seasons and one group stage of the Champions League have already been completed and UEFA already has a system for calculating club coefficients, FIFA has chosen to adapt the scoring to that used in the UEFA rankings: awarding 2 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 4 points for qualifying for the group stage, 5 points for qualifying for the round of 16 and 1 point for each progression to the next rounds of the competition.

Within this calculation, Benfica secured early qualification for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup with 52 points. Seven of them were earned in the 2023/24 edition, while the trips to the quarter-finals of the Champions League in 2022/23 and 2021/22 were worth 25 and 20 points, respectively.

The format of the competition will be similar to the one used in the men's World Cups between 1998 and 2022. The 32 participants will be divided into eight groups of four clubs, with the two best-placed teams qualifying for the round of 16. From then on, the teams will play each other in a single match until the final, although there will be no third or fourth place play-off.

UEFA will be represented by 12 clubs and CONMEBOL (South America) by six, while CAF (Africa), AFC (Asia) and CONCACAF (North America and the Caribbean) will have four each. OFC (Oceania) will take one club. The remaining place will be awarded to a team from the United States of America, the host country.