Visa has become the third long-standing Fifa Partner to additionally sign up as a top sponsor of the Club World Cup, which gets under way next month.
The payment services brand, a Fifa Partner since the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, will be the official payment technology partner of the Club World Cup in the United States between June 14 and July 13.
It joins fellow Fifa Partners Adidas and Coca-Cola in the Club World Cup stable, where the trio are joined by Hisense and Bank of America.
Fifa Partners for the current World Cup cycle not yet involved in the Club World Cup are Aramco, Hyundai-Kia, Lenovo and Qatar Airways.
Fifa said more tournament partners and suppliers “are currently being contracted and expected to be announced in the coming weeks”.
The Club World Cup on US soil appealed to Visa given it also has strong commercial ties to US Soccer, as a long-running sponsor of the national governing body. The current deal runs to 2028.
Given Visa’s strong relationship with Fifa, there was understood to be little competition from Mastercard in taking on the Club World Cup rights, despite the potential appeal of being a rival brand partnering with football’s governing body just a year out from the World Cup also on US soil.
As exclusively reported by SportBusiness in August 2023, representatives from Visa and Fifa met at the Women’s World Cup to agree the deal for the brand to once again become a Fifa Partner until 2026. Fifa did not officially announce the new contract until January 2024.
The Fifa Partner designation grants sponsors the rights to activate across all of the federation’s youth, beach soccer and FIFAe esports and women’s events, culminating in the prized asset of the 2026 Fifa World Cup, co-hosted by USA, Mexico and Canada.
Visa’s previous eight-year Fifa Partner deal expired at the end of 2022. Fifa unbundled the women’s sponsorship rights from those for its men’s events at the end of the 2019-22 cycle, but top-tier Fifa Partners continue to be granted sponsorship rights across all Fifa men’s, women’s and esports tournaments under the new sponsorship hierarchy.
Keen to tie down the Women’s Football Partner rights immediately on the expiry of the deal, given the proximity to the 2023 Women’s World Cup, Visa signed a standalone ‘Women’s Football Partner’ agreement with the global governing body that granted sponsorship rights at all Fifa women’s events and grassroots activities throughout the four-year period from 2023 to 2026. It was agreed on the understanding the women’s rights could be subsumed into a renewal in the top-tier category at a later date.
Visa’s Club World Cup agreement with Fifa appears to been less contentious than those with Coca-Cola and Adidas, which last year were reported to have lodged separate cases with the Swiss Arbitration Center in Zurich, arguing that the sponsorship rights to the tournament were included as part of their top-tier Fifa Partner deals.
The Guardian reported in October last year that the two companies had been ‘less than thrilled’ when the federation invited them to enter a tender process for new contracts to the revamped 32-team club competition.
At the end of January Adidas was announced as the ‘Official Match Ball’ supplier for the Club World Cup and a month later Coca-Cola was named as a tournament partner.
It is unclear if the Swiss arbitrators found in favour of the two brands and they were awarded the sponsorship rights to the event by default, or if they found in favour of Fifa and the two parties have had to agree additional, standalone sponsorship deals for the competition.
Hisense kickstarted the sluggish sales process for the Club World Cup when it was announced as an ‘Official Partner’ of the tournament in October last year. As exclusively reported by SportBusiness, AB InBev became the second sponsor for the tournament soon afterwards before Bank of America joined the portfolio.
Bank of America’s deal came three months after it signed on as the official bank of the 2026 Fifa World Cup, a Global Sponsor position that sits in the second tier in Fifa’s World Cup sponsorship tree, below Fifa Partner.