Game Day Essentials
• Final: Chelsea FC (#10) vs Paris Saint-Germain (#1)
• Date and Time: Sunday, July 13 at 3:00 pm ET
• Venue: MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ
• Forecast: Hot, sunny, dry, 83F/28C
• How to Watch: DAZN, Sling TV, TBS
• Referee: Alireza Faghani (AUS)
This special 2025 FIFA Club World Cup edition of Oppo Research features two posts, one that profiles Chelsea FC and one that profiles Paris Saint-Germain. Read one, then the other: Here is your 2025 FIFA Club World Cup Final preview.
Michael Battista
1. João Pedro is good at soccer
João Pedro began his professional career at Fluminense FC before moving to Watford FC, where he scored 24 goals in 109 appearances. He then signed for Brighton & Hove Albion FC in 2023, scoring 30 goals in 70 games across two seasons.
Chelsea signed the 23-year-old striker for $82 million this summer, and he joined the squad on July 2, after the FIFA Club World Cup was well underway. For reasons that escape many, this was perfectly within the rules.
João Pedro made his Chelsea debut in the quarterfinal win over Palmeiras, coming on in the 54th minute, and looked dangerous. But he would prove his value in his first-ever Chelsea start, when he filled in for the suspended Liam Delap against Fluminense.
João Pedro scored two outstanding goals against his boyhood club, leading Chelsea to its second-ever Club World Cup final. Chelsea were awarded about $30 million after advancing to today's game, which offsets a good chunk of the transfer fee paid to Brighton.
When this tournament started, João Pedro was on holiday in Brazil and still a Brighton player. Now, he’s the reason Chelsea is in the final, and could provide the team with their best chance to stage an upset win over PSG that most pundits pick to lift the trophy later today.
Oliver Strand
2. Bloated squad? It works, tbh
Chelsea played six matches at this summer’s competition, winning five and losing just once, a 3-1 defeat against Brazilian side CR Flamengo in the Group Stage. None of those six matches saw the same Starting XI put forth by Chelsea boss Enzo Mareca, with the Italian making at least two changes to his starting lineup in every match.
Strikers Liam Delap, Nicolas Jackson, and the newly acquired João Pedro all started at least once during this competition. The same can be said for members of Chelsea's stacked midfield, with Cole Palmer, Christopher Nkunku, Enzo Fernandez, Pedro Neto, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, and recently departed Noni Madeuke (who is now back in England ahead of a $70 million transfer to Arsenal FC according to Fabrizio Romano) all securing starts as No 10s or out wide.
Maresca was asked all season long about the ever-growing size of his First Team squad, and the acquisition mode under American ownership led by the controversial Todd Boehly, which seems to consist of adding more players than is reasonable or possibly legal. The doubts carried over into the summer as Chelsea remain active in the transfer market, but the FIFA Club World Cup has served as a perfect testing ground for answering those questions within the squad.
3. Enzo Fernández, Caicedo run the midfield
Chelsea typically lines up in a 4-2-3-1, with two midfielders — Enzo Fernández and Moisés Caicedo — playing above the back four. The duo complement each other perfectly: Enzo gets forward and creates chances, while Caicedo stays home and helps win the ball back.
Enzo has a tournament-leading three assists, created three big chances, and created 10 overall chances. As for Caicedo, he averages 2.1 successful tackles per 90 minutes, which translates to a tackle success rate of 56.3%. He’s a key reason why Chelsea has recorded three clean sheets and allowed just four goals in five Club World Cup games.
Caicedo will try to prevent PSG from thriving from its quick build-up plays, while Enzo must create chances and help break down a PSG side that has only conceded one goal all tournament. If Chelsea is to have a chance at winning this game, both players will need to cook.
Oliver Strand
4. Seeking a Second Title
Chelsea can make history by becoming just the fifth team to ever win a second FIFA Club World Cup title, while also becoming the first English team to accomplish that feat.
But a 2025 win would mean more than just that.
Take your mind back to 2020, when the world was wrapped in turmoil because of COVID. The expanded FIFA Club World Cup was scheduled to begin in China in 2021, but the pandemic postponed the new-look event for what turned out to be five years. In the meantime, fans saw three FIFA Club World Cup tournaments played under the old single-elimination format. Chelsea was triumphant in one of those, winning the 2021 FIFA Club World Cup in February 2022.
Only one player from the matchday squad that faced Palmeiras for the title remains at the club, center-back Trevoh Chalobah. He is also the last player remaining at Chelsea from the UEFA Champions League-winning squad four years ago (he was rostered but on loan to FC Lorient in France at the time), which just happens to be the game that secured the team’s place in the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup.
All this to say, Chelsea is a team looking for boosts. The four-year stretch since 2021 has seen the team fall in the league table, finish runner-up in domestic competitions, and get knocked out of Champions League competitions early. May’s win over Real Betis to secure the 2024/25 UEFA Conference League could be seen as cathartic – silverware is silverware, after all – or as slumming it: What is a club that by many estimates spent more than $1 billion in transfer fees doing in Europe's third-tier tournament?
Winning a legit world championship would be so monumental that nobody will remember that they qualified for the tournament only thanks to a pandemic-era title.
Hudson River Blue Staff
5. The lone American
In a case of "who the hell are you talking about?" there is one familiar face on Chelsea’s roster that Major League Soccer fans might recognize, and who could be one win away from a world championship.
Backup goalkeeper Gabriel Slonina did not seem like he was going to be on the roster for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, after being loaned out by the club every year since he joined in 2022 from Chicago Fire FC. But the Addison, Illinois native was called in after Djordje Petrović (another MLS alum)asked to be left out of Chelsea’s FIFA Club World Cup squad. Slonina has been on the bench every game in the knockout rounds.
Slonina came up through Chicago’s youth academy, then he went on to play 43 games for the first team between 2021 and 2022. A Homegrown, he made history in his MLS debut on Wednesday, August 4, 2021, by becoming the youngest goalkeeper to ever start an MLS match when he earned a clean sheet in a 0-0 draw against New York City FC at Soldier Field.
As Christian Smith wrote in these pages at the halftime break in that game, “The Fire are currently using a goalkeeper that has never played before and is the youngest keeper to ever play an MLS game. If City are to come away with a win, they need to start challenging him with shots.”
NYCFC didn’t, and now Slonina is 90 minutes away from standing on the podium at MetLife Stadium.
Oliver Strand
