International Champions Cup

International Champions Cup

Founded	2013
Region	CONCACAF UEFA
Number of teams	8
Current champions	Manchester United (1st title)
Website	internationalchampionscup.com
2015

The International Champions Cup (ICC) is an annual club association football friendly exhibition competition. It predominantly features club teams from Europe playing matches in the United States and occasionally Canada, with a wider roll-out to further countries beginning in 2015 with an expansion to China and Australia. The ICC was founded by Relevant Sports, a division of RSE ventures, a sports promotion company founded in 2012 by billionaire real estate magnate and Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and Matt Higgins, a former executive with the New York Jets.^[1][2] It replaced the World Football Challenge, which had featured a more even distribution of European- and American-based sides.^[3]

One match during the 2014 tournament set the all-time record for attendance at a soccer game in the United States. The new record of 109,318 spectators was set August 2, 2014 at the match between Manchester United and Real Madrid in University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan.^[4]

Format

So far, both tournaments have featured eight teams organized into two groups of four. After playing a series of games against teams in their own groups, the tournament then combines the teams in order to crown a champion, though the exact format has altered in each competition so far.

In the 2013 iteration, the participants were designated as part an "Eastern" and a "Western" group based on the location of their group stage matches. The groups were not played as a round-robin; rather, the winners of the first-round matches played each other in the second round, and the first-round losers also played each other in the second round. The two teams with two wins from the first two matches advanced to the final. The other three teams of each group were then ranked based on their records in the two matches played, with a game won in normal time counting for two points and a game won on a deciding penalty shootout (no tied games were permitted) counting for one, with traditional methods of ranking - goal difference, goals scored, etc - determining order in case of two teams having the same points total. After the teams in each group had been ranked, they were paired against their opposite number from the other group, second playing second, third playing third, fourth playing fourth, with the results of these final matches determining a definitive placing for each team, from first place to eighth.

In the 2014 season, this slightly awkward system was done away with, the teams separating into non-geographical groups and instead playing a round-robin format with one game played against each other team in their group. After each team has played three games, the top-placed team from each group will contest a final to determine the overall winner.^[5]

Winners

Tournament	Winner	Runner-Up
2013	Real Madrid	Chelsea
2014	Manchester United	Liverpool

References

External links

• Official website