Warning shot for 2026: Club World Cup's brutal heat exposes a World Cup risk

The Guardian

5 hours ago

In the 31 years since the United States last hosted the men's World Cup, a few things remain unchanged.
Recent politics notwithstanding, the US population is diverse and air travel is relatively easy, so international games tend to attract supporters no matter where they live. As long as ticket prices are reasonable, a good crowd is a good bet.
Also – it still gets really hot in the summer. This, of course, is not news. It was a major subplot of the 1994 World Cup, it will be a major subplot of the 2026 edition – which the US will co-host with Canada and Mexico as the climate crisis makes heatwaves more likely – and it's a major subplot of the Club World Cup this summer.
The 19th-century Englishmen who wrote the first official Laws of the Game probably didn't anticipate the brutal heat that players often have to endure in a US summer, but everyone else should. Some rules of basic mathematics and climate are incontrovertible. A southern US venue plus a midday start time equals 22 players broiling in the sun, and it's odd that Fifa, in charge of the Club World Cup and next year's World Cup, does not appear to have foreseen that playing in blistering heat isn't much fun.
So who benefits from this scheduling and heat? And who appears to worry about it the most? The answer to both questions: Europe.
Games aren't starting at noon and 3pm local time on weekdays for the benefit of fans in the US. Those games land neatly in the evening for European viewers. Yes, Fifa could schedule more games to start at 9pm local time when temperatures are much cooler, but that's well past midnight in Europe, which makes fans, broadcasters and sponsors less happy.
But European teams aren't quite as happy about those earlier kick-offs. Consider Chelsea, who cut short their training session in the run-up to their game against Espérance. They're not the first European squad to come to the east coast and notice, in the words of Jimmy Buffett, changes in latitude and changes in attitude. Philadelphia is 10 degrees closer to the equator than London – and Philly is one of the more northerly venues in this summer's Club World Cup. It is, in the organizers' defense, not usually this hot in Philadelphia or New York, and the one hot game in Pasadena was an aberration.
Still, temperatures in the mid-30sC/mid-90sF are hardly unusual in Orlando or Charlotte. (Nor are they unusual in Atlanta, but teams assigned to play there are breathing comfortably in the air conditioning under the dome of Mercedes-Benz Stadium.) And even with cool Seattle in the mix, the median temperature through Monday's games was 81F (27C), with a median heat index of 87F (31C) and the dewpoint at a muggy 68F.
This suggests European teams will have a problem with temperatures this summer and at next year's World Cup; that Chelsea were at a disadvantage against the Tunisian champions even before they kicked off. And that's the reason why teams from Brazil, where the state leagues play in the southern hemisphere's summer, have impressed so far in this tournament. Perhaps that could be a function of the long-held stereotype that Latin America plays possession football to conserve energy in the heat while Europeans run around like maniacs, afraid that they'll freeze if they stand still too long.
But the limited data from major tournaments in the US doesn't support the notion that European teams are doomed to wilt in a North American summer.
Seven of the eight quarter-finalists at USA 1994 were from Europe. Sweden helped themselves to a 3-1 win at high noon in Dallas against Saudi Arabia, a team, one would presume, who would cope a little better in the heat. Romania and Switzerland advanced from group play at the expense of a heralded side from Colombia. In all, 10 of the 13 European teams advanced to the knockout stage in 1994, while only two of the four South American teams made it out of the group stage. Concacaf, featuring the host USA and nearest neighbor Mexico, advanced both of its teams. Asia and Africa combined to have two of their five teams advance.
That performance by Europe's best was an improvement from four years earlier on their home continent. In Italy, all four South American sides reached the knockout stage, along with Costa Rica and Cameroon. Eventual finalists Argentina were the only South American team in the quarter-finals, but Cameroon joined them. In group play, Scotland and Sweden found themselves eliminated by Brazil (expectedly) and Costa Rica (unexpectedly).
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These games, along with the decidedly mixed results in Qatar in 2022, aren't a particularly convincing sample size. And we have very little to go on for club games, aside from the pre-season friendlies in which European clubs sleepwalk their way through steamy matches that rake in money from US fans drawn to the stadiums by celebrity and cosplay.
This Club World Cup has seen a handful of notable upsets, but they don't seem attributable to the weather. Inter Miami beat Porto indoors in Atlanta. Botafogo stunned Paris Saint-Germain on a mild night in Pasadena, also the site of the Mexican side Monterrey's draw against Italy's Inter. Auckland City drew with Boca Juniors, but, if anything, it's the Argentinians who are more used to the heat.
That leaves us with Chelsea, who lost to the Brazilian side Flamengo in warm Philadelphia. But is that a function of the weather, Flamengo being better than was first thought, or Chelsea not giving this tournament the same sense of urgency as their opponents?
The heat also isn't hindering attendance, or teams' offensive power. PSG's four-goal outburst took place in the best-attended match, with more than 80,000 fans nearly filling the Rose Bowl in the one unusually hot Pasadena game. More than 70,000 fans gathered in Charlotte to see Real Madrid dispatch Pachuca 3-1 despite a temperature in the mid-90s fahrenheit. Plotting all of the games' scores, attendance figures and reported temperatures shows little to no correlation – if anything, attendance and scoring have gone slightly up as the temperature rises. It appears people turn up to watch good matches, and stay away from bad matches, no matter what the temperature.
But it would be stupid to deny playing in extreme heat can be dangerous. At last year's Copa América, hosted by the US, an assistant referee collapsed during a match played in suffocating heat in Kansas City. Heat also limits players' ability to play full-throttle football. One vivid example was the 2008 Olympic men's soccer final, played at midday in the cauldron of Beijing's Bird's Nest so that the stadium would be cleared in time for the evening's track and field events. Temperatures in the heat-trapping venue soared well above 100F (38C), and players were granted hydration breaks, common today but novel at the time. The lone goal was assisted by one Lionel Messi, playing alongside his current Inter Miami manager, Javier Mascherano, which perhaps bodes well for Inter's chances in the knockout rounds. The scorer was Ángel Di María, who got another game with a heat index in the mid-100s on Tuesday in Charlotte with Benfica.
At some point, southern heat overcomes southern hospitality, and organizers can surely do better with scheduling. Why play a game at 3pm local time in Charlotte? Surely Fifa can work with US organizers at next year's World Cup to make sure that afternoon games are played in cities such as Seattle, San Francisco or Vancouver (although the climate crisis means even those cities endure their share of sweltering days).
And yet, after Benfica took a shock 1-0 lead against Bayern in the blistering heat Tuesday in Charlotte, both teams could be seen pressing far into the opposition half. Today's elite players can, mostly, endure harsh conditions. But that doesn't mean Fifa should keep requiring them to do so when alternative schedules exist.