The Athletic sieht uns overall auf Platz 22 von 32
- Red Bull Salzburg
This is where FIFA’s longer-range qualifying criteria might backfire slightly. Because while, a couple of seasons ago, Salzburg were perennial Austrian champions and Champions League mainstays, this year they only avoided landing in the third-tier Conference League by a point. Pep Lijnders, Jurgen Klopp’s former assistant at Liverpool and now on Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City staff, was appointed as head coach last summer but was then sacked before Christmas. Though results improved after his departure, they will travel to America as the weakest European team in the competition.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6406082/2025/06/12/club-world-cup-ranked-teams/
Methode:
The first thing to say is that this is not simply ranking based on how good each team are on the pitch. We have used some metrics that measure on-field performance, but we were also interested in comparing the clubs in terms of their global profiles and financial muscle.
The five criteria we have used are:
- Their Opta Power Ranking, which awards a score out of 100 to every club side in the world, based on weighted results.
- Cumulative transfer spend over the past five years
- Average attendance for their home games last season
- Total social-media followers (on X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok)
- Continental titles (top-level only: so the Champions League or equivalent, not the Europa League) won in their history
We ranked each club in each category from one to 32, then divided by five to give an overall score — the lower the score, the higher the ranking. We did, however, apply different weighting to some of those categories, placing more emphasis on the Opta ratings (on the basis that it ranks recent performance) and slightly diminishing the importance of all-time continental title wins. The latter are important, but also hard to judge on equal terms, given the relative strengths of the different football federations.
