Chelsea start CWC campaign to thousands of empty seats

Chelsea kicked off their Fifa Club World Cup campaign against Los Angeles FC to tens of thousands of empty seats in Atlanta.

The game started at 3pm local time on a working Monday at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

The ground can hold 75,000 spectators, but the entire top tier was closed for this match.

Sources told the BBC that Fifa was expecting a crowd of about 26,000, but it did not appear that busy at kick-off.

A small middle tier seemed to be mostly full, but a larger bottom tier was more than half empty.

The cheapest ticket was about £37 before kick-off. During the game tickets were still on sale online for £26 - with many available in nearly every section.

Los Angeles is more than 2,000 miles away from Atlanta, across the southern United States.

Their 1,500 ultras dominated the atmosphere.

The newly expanded Club World Cup is being treated as a dress rehearsal for the international World Cup next summer, which will be held in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

The CWC is just being played in the US.

One of the big talking points in recent weeks was whether people cared about Fifa's new-look competition.

Ticket sales have been slow, and this was the first match of the tournament to take place on a weekday.

Chelsea also played at the stadium two years ago - and almost sold out with more than 70,000 fans watching them face Newcastle in a friendly tournament named the Premier League Summer Series.