The FIFA Club World Cup Is Here ...Middle East

Stat, Viz, Quiz is the Opta Analyst football newsletter. This week’s edition looks at the Club World Cup, a Real Madrid target, and free-kicks.

Just when you thought football was over, it pulls you back in.

FIFA has reinvented the Club World Cup with significantly more teams, significantly more prize money, and therefore, significantly more football for fans to enjoy over the summer.

You can read plenty about the CWC elsewhere on the Opta Analyst site ahead of the tournament, including group-by-group previews and an overall Opta supercomputer predictor, but we wanted to discuss it in this week’s SVQ, particularly looking at the rankings of each team.

Our summer series analysing transfer targets continues, with this week’s subject a potential star of the future for both Real Madrid and Argentina, Franco Mastantuono.

We plan to theme our weekly quiz during the coming months ahead of the 2025-26 season, starting this week with a set of questions all about Premier League free-kick stats.

There is no Ask Opta question this week, but if you want to have a football stat query answered in next week’s landmark 100th edition of Stat, Viz, Quiz, send it to [email protected] by next Monday.

Our century edition is for next week, though. For now, we’re going to party like it’s SVQ 99.

If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe below for free to receive SVQ every Tuesday.

STAT – Club World Cup Fever

It’s the tournament you never knew you needed, and perhaps you still don’t.

Until the Club World Cup gets under way, we don’t know to what extent it may take the football world by storm, but you suspect most of us will end up watching it (well, we definitely will because it’s our job, but that’s beside the point).

There will be 32 teams competing from all over the world, as the name suggests, with 31 of those teams ranking between 3rd and 611th on the planet, according to the Opta Power Rankings. The Power Rankings assigns an ability score to over 13,500 men’s domestic football teams on a scale between zero and 100, where zero is the worst-ranked team in the world and 100 is the best team in the world. It ranks teams from 183 different countries and 413 unique domestic leagues.

The outliers are Auckland City, the sole representative from the OFC, who currently sit quite a way back. In fact, they are in 4,960th place in the Power Rankings.

They have won the last four OFC Men’s Champions League tournaments, hence their place at the CWC, and will participate in (a version of) the Club World Cup for the 12th time since its inception in 2000, more often than any other club. They also qualified for the Club World Cup in 2020 but withdrew due to COVID measures.

Auckland also finished third in the Club World Cup in 2014, the only time an OFC representative has finished as high in the tournament. But not only was that 11 years ago, it was also obviously the previous iteration of the tournament with significantly fewer and mostly lower-ranked teams participating.

At this iteration of the CWC, they will be facing intimidating opponents in Bayern Munich, Benfica and Boca Juniors in the group stage.

Auckland City, who play at the 3,500-capacity Kiwitea Street stadium and were founded in 2004, will be playing Bayern in their opening match on 15 June, which will be quite the disparity when it comes to world ranking, with the Bundesliga giants 4,954 places above them.

For context, there are as many ranking spots between Bayern and Auckland City as there are between Champions League finalists Inter and Bray Wanderers from the League of Ireland First Division.

The next lowest-ranked club present at the tournament will be UAE side Al Ain, currently ranked 611th.

Not to hammer home the point, but here’s another graphic showing the gap back to Auckland City.

In fairness, we should point out that one of the chief reasons they are so low in the rankings is simply because they almost never get to play against other teams with many ranking points, so wins for them move the needle a lot less than, for example, someone like Plymouth Argyle beating Liverpool in the FA Cup. Should Auckland get even a draw from any of their three games in this tournament, expect them to shoot up the rankings.

We’ll be cheering on the Navy Blues in any case, because we love an underdog.

VIZ – Madridista-ntuono?

Real Madrid will be looking to go all the way at the Club World Cup and have set about boosting their squad under new boss Xabi Alonso.

Trent Alexander-Arnold has already arrived from Liverpool, while 20-year-old centre-back Dean Huijsen has been procured from Bournemouth. 

Then there is another potential signing, even younger than Huijsen, though unlikely to arrive in time to play for Madrid at the CWC.

Franco Mastantuono doesn’t even turn 18 until mid-August, but he has already established himself as one of the most exciting prospects out of Argentina in recent years, and rumours are that the Spanish capital is his next port of call.

The exciting wide forward recorded just three goals and three assists in 41 appearances for River Plate last season, though only 12 of those had been starts.

However, in the 2025-26 campaign, Mastantuono has 11 goal involvements (7 goals, 4 assists) in 19 games in all competitions for River Plate, more goals than any of his teammates and the joint-most assists along with Gonzalo Montiel.

Of his goals, one particularly stands out. A stunning 30-yard free-kick against Boca Juniors in April’s Superclásico opened the scoring as River Plate ultimately won 2-1 against their great rivals. To score a goal of that quality on that stage and at that age must have alerted anyone who wasn’t already aware of Mastantuono’s immense talent.

He is more than just moments, though. Only Rosario Central’s Ignacio Malcorra (5) has more assists in the Argentine top flight this season, while only two players have created more chances from open play than his 23.

Mastantuono likes a shot, having attempted the most in the Primera División in 2025-26 with 52. His shot conversion rate of 7.7% will need improving; he clearly has plenty of time to work on that, though.

He likes to run with the ball, and he does it well. He has completed 35 dribbles in the league this season, with only two players in the division managing more.

As for work off the ball, he has won possession in the opposition’s final third 13 times, with only two players doing so more often this season.

He has been central to a lot of River Plate’s attacking this season, having more attacking sequence involvements than any other player in the Argentine top flight (85), despite still not having played 1,000 minutes of league football in 2025-26.

It would be unfair to expect Mastantuono to be an immediate superstar in La Liga at 17 like Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal, but if he is given opportunities at the Santiago Bernabéu next season, this left-footed prodigy who cuts in off the right wing could be getting comparisons with another Argentine beginning with ‘M’ who used to play for Real Madrid’s El Clásico foe.

No pressure, of course.

QUIZ – Fun with Free-Kicks

Rather than assume you’ll be tuning in to every game of the Club World Cup, we’ll stick with the Premier League for most of our quizzes this summer. Our first theme is based on free-kicks. How much do you know about dead-ball specialists? Answers at the bottom of the page.

1. Who has scored the most direct free-kicks in Premier League history?

2. Who has scored the most direct free-kicks in a single season in Premier League history?

3. James Ward-Prowse has scored 17 direct free-kicks in the Premier League, but against which team did he score his last one?

4. Who scored the most direct free-kicks in the Premier League in the 2024-25 season?

5. Which player attempted the most direct free-kicks in the Premier League in 2024-25?

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Quiz Answers

1. Who has scored the most direct free-kicks in Premier League history?

David Beckham (18)

2. Who has scored the most direct free-kicks in a single season in Premier League history?

David Beckham (2000-01) and Laurent Robert (2001-02) – Both 5

3. James Ward-Prowse has scored 17 direct free-kicks in the Premier League, but against which team did he score his last one?

Against Chelsea for Southampton on 18 February 2023. He has not scored a direct free-kick since leaving St Mary’s

4. Who scored the most direct free-kicks in the Premier League in the 2024-25 season?

Bruno Fernandes (2) – He was the only player to score more than one in England’s top flight

5. Which player attempted the most direct free-kicks in the Premier League in 2024-25?

Eberechi Eze (16) – At least four more attempts than any other player, and with none leading directly to a goal

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