On this week’s episode of Listen In With KNN, host Kelsey Nicole Nelson dives deep into the increasing excitement for Soccer and the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup with FIFA’s Chief Football Officer Jill Ellis.
We’re counting down the days to the FIFA Club World Cup, which will run from June 14th to July 13th. It will feature all of the top clubs from the biggest leagues around the world competing at various venues across the United States.
One of those venues is Audi Field, right in the heart of the DMV, where FIFA traveled for the unveiling of the Club World Cup trophy. Ellis, 58, was there to see the magnitude of the trophy and the excitement surrounding it.
“You’re gonna have to have two captains hoist that trophy,” Ellis joked about its size.
The Club World Cup is a very important stepping stone in continuing to ignite the growing passion for soccer in the United States. First-time soccer fans increased 400% from 2023 to 2024 and are still rising.
The tournament will be hosted in a variety of venues all across the United States, including Audi Field in the Buzzard Point neighborhood of Washington, D.C., giving new soccer fans the chance to experience soccer in the U.S. like they never have before. When major clubs have come to compete on U.S. soil in the past, it’s been for friendlies or scrimmages that don’t have particularly high stakes, if any. Now, they’ll play in a knockout-style tournament for a $1,000,000,000 prize pool. A style of competition that, as Ellis notes, Americans love.
With something that important happening, you have to promote it to the best of your ability.
“The reality is when something is new, you do have to raise the profile,” Ellis said on the President’s effort to get up close and personal with the fans.
Ellis has a long journey with soccer. She was born and raised in the United Kingdom for most of her young life. When she was growing up, girls had limited access to organized soccer, so her love of the sport grew from a distance. She moved to the northern Virginia area when she was 15, where she got her real taste for soccer. Not only was she able to play it, but she got to experience the 1994 FIFA World Cup. It was incredibly transformative in her deep love for soccer, and she wants the Club World Cup to have a similar effect, bringing even more fans to the sport.
“Boys or girls, when you come and you watch that, your hope, my hope, always as a coach, as someone who loved the development of the game, is that kids leave there and go ‘I wanna do that,'” Ellis said. “Or ‘I wanna go kick a ball around’ or ‘I wanna fall in love with this game’. It ignites a spark.”
When FIFA president Gianni Infantino presented the trophy at Audi Field, it felt like home. It was a unique experience for her to see the grand prize of the tournament be presented in a place where she got her first real taste of the sport.
Growing the sport for others is incredibly important to her in her current role, which involves implementing FIFA’s global strategy to the best of their ability. In the interview, she talks about not just spreading the “glitz and glam” of the World Cup events in the U.S. – the Club World Cup in 2025, Men’s in 2026, and Women’s in 2031 – but making sure that all competitive soccer is properly showcased to the countries exponentially growing fanbase. Not just in the form of tournaments, but also providing opportunities for kids to play in funded tournaments, a side of the organization that not many see.
“This is truly a global game,” Ellis emphasized. “You’ve got a million kids playing it, but not every kid gets seen, and not every kid gets coached or has a pathway. And so now this methodology is to try and find kids and talent and help them create a pathway to, you know, potentially go on and win a World Cup someday.”
Before her current position, she spent time as the president of San Diego Wave FC of the National Women’s Soccer League.
For Nelson and Ellis’ full conversation, check out the full episode here!
