The FIFA Club World Cup, commonly referred to as the Club World Cup, is an international men's association
football competition organised by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The championship was first contested as the 2000 FIFA Club World Championship. It was not held between 2001 to
2004 due to a combination of factors, most importantly the collapse of FIFA's marketing partner International Sport and Leisure. Since 2005, the competition has been held every year, hosted so far by
Brazil, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.
The first FIFA Club World Championship took place in
Brazil in January 2000. It ran in parallel with the Intercontinental Cup, a non-FIFA affiliated competition first disputed in 1960 by the winners of the European Champions' Cup and the Copa de Campeones de América. Initially created as Intercontinental Champions Clubs' Cup, since the 1980 season the competition was renamed the European/South American Cup and also knowns as the
Toyota Cup following a
change in format which saw
Toyota become the main sponsor of the competition until it was discontinued in 2004. In 2005, the FIFA Club World Championship absorbed the
Toyota Cup and the competition's pilot edition and in 2006 took its current name.
The current format of the tournament involves
seven teams competing for the FIFA Club World
Cup at venues within the host nation over a period of about two weeks; the winners of that year's
AFC Champions League (Asia),
CAF Champions League (Africa), CONCACAF Champions League (North America), Copa Libertadores (South America), OFC Champions League (Oceania) and UEFA Champions League (Europe), along with the host nation's national champions, participate in a straight
knock-out tournament. The host nation's national champions dispute a play-off against the Oceania champions, from which the winner joins the champions of Asia, Africa and North America at the quarter-finals. The quarter-final winners go on to face the European and South
American champions, who enter at the semi-final stage, for a place in the final.
