By David Owen
May 19 – German giants Bayern Munich are the club providing most players to the provisional 2014 World Cup squad lists circulated by FIFA last week. The Bundesliga champions have 18 players on FIFA’s release list, two more than Manchester United, who were comfortably the most heavily-represented Premier League club, despite their difficult 2013-14 season.
The squad lists are of more than academic interest to clubs, since they can be paid at a rate of $2,800 a day for players making the final 23-man squads.
In 2010, when the equivalent daily rate was only $1,600, Spain’s Barcelona received the highest payment of $866,267, with Bayern second and Chelsea third. This time, it looks highly likely that the biggest payments will top $1 million.
Based on the FIFA release list of the mainly 30-man provisional squads for Brazil, and allotting players the club they are assigned to on this list, a total of 12 clubs provide 11 or more players. They are:
Bayern Munich (18), Manchester United (16), Barcelona (14), Juventus (13), Napoli (13), Real Madrid (13), Liverpool (12), Manchester City (12), Atlético Madrid (11), Chelsea (11), Internazionale (11) and Paris Saint-Germain (11).
The number of Manchester United personnel in the 32 final squads is highly likely to fall since, for example, it is already known that two of their England contingent – Michael Carrick and Tom Cleverley – are stand-by players. Squads must be cut to 23 by June 2.
Clubs located in the Big Five west European football economies (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) provided fractionally over half of the 950-plus players in provisional squads.
English clubs were most heavily represented, supplying 136 players from more than 30 clubs, the equivalent of almost six World Cup squads; German and Italian clubs also each supplied more than 100 provisional squad players.
Excluding the Big Five, countries whose clubs provided the most players were as follows: Russia (43), Mexico (36), Netherlands/Turkey (both 28), Portugal (27), USA (26) and Japan (25).
Clubs from host nation Brazil supplied just 18 players and Argentina only 10. Clubs from over 50 countries provided at least one player.
FIFA has set aside $70 million in all to make payments to the clubs of final squad players at Brazil 2014, up from $40 million in 2010.
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