Decision follows an agreement reached last year between the football governing body and the European Club Association
Fifa has confirmed that clubs worldwide will receive a combined $355m as part of an expanded benefits programme for the 2026 World Cup.
The club benefits programme is an initiative first introduced for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. It is an avenue for Fifa to compensate clubs for their role in scouting, training and investing in players who display their talent for their national teams on the global stage.
Clubs whose players feature at the World Cup will receive a proportion of the payment. However, for the first time the scheme will cover not only players released for the World Cup finals but also those involved in qualifying matches.
The decision follows a memorandum of understanding signed last year between Fifa and the European Club Association (ECA), designed to strengthen cooperation between national teams and club football.
In the 2022 edition of the World Cup, $209m was shared among 440 clubs across 51 Fifa member associations. The new framework for 2026 represents a 70 per cent rise on the payment handed out for that edition in Qatar.
Fifa president Gianni Infantino said: “The enhanced edition of the Fifa club benefits programme for the Fifa World Cup 2026 is going a step further by recognising financially the huge contribution that so many clubs and their players around the world make to the staging of both the qualifiers and the final tournament.”
