Arsenal fails to qualify for FIFA Club World Cup 2025 after Champions League exit; Austrian team Salzburg makes the cut

Arsenal could have qualified for the revamped FIFA club competiton only if it won this season’s Champions League

Arsenal’s Martin Odegaard reacts after losing the Champions League quarterfinal second leg match against Bayern Munich. | Photo Credit: AP

Austrian team FC Salzburg is going to next year’s Club World Cup in the United States as one of the top 12 teams from Europe, thanks to Bayern Munich completing a 3-2 aggregate win over Arsenal in the Champions League quarterfinals on Wednesday.

Arsenal could have qualified if it won this season’s Champions League. Teams can qualify for Club World Cup spots either by having won the Champions League since 2021 or via a ranking system of their Champions League performances over four seasons.

Salzburg profited from a rule that only two teams per country can qualify unless a country had three different Champions League winners in the last four years. It meant that Arsenal needed to win this year’s competition to join 2021 winner Chelsea and last year’s winner City, the other two qualified English clubs. Among other teams which miss out are Liverpool, Barcelona and Milan.

Steady but unspectacular results were enough for Salzburg. It qualified for the Champions League group stage in each of the last four seasons but only reached the round of 16 once, losing 8-2 on aggregate to Bayern Munich in 2022. In total, Salzburg played 26 Champions League games over the last four seasons, winning only six of them.

UEFA’s own ranking system for European competitions — different from the FIFA system used for the Club World Cup — lists Salzburg as the 40th-strongest team in Europe, between Croatian team Dinamo Zagreb and Dutch club AZ Alkmaar.