La Liga’s recent announcement that it was abandoning its long-in-the-works plan to hold a regular-season match between Villarreal and Barcelona in Miami this December seemed to represent a victory of common sense over greed. The brainchild of league president Javier Tebas and U.S.-based sports promoter Relevent, the scheme to bring real blood-on-the-grass Iberian club soccer to America was hated by pretty much everyone else associated with it at a professional level in Spain. Supporter groups were unrelenting in their criticism of the idea. Barcelona manager Hansi Flick repeatedly expressed his displeasure at the prospect of having to travel almost 5,000 miles for the match, which would be a clear drain on his squad’s energy in the middle of a hectic season. Players from all teams across the league staged several on- and off-field protests in opposition to the plan.
Even UEFA, hardly a body hostile to the cause of European club football’s crass commercialization, was opposed, only agreeing to the plan “reluctantly” as a compromise to avoid the possibility of a legal showdown with Relevent—and to give itself time to plug gaps in the regulatory framework that allow schemes to play overseas to occupy, for now at least, a kind of legal penumbra. “League matches should be played on home soil; anything else would disenfranchise loyal match-going fans and potentially introduce distortive elements in competitions,” UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin observed, correctly, while announcing his organization’s approval of the game. The hope, clearly, was that by sternly registering its distaste, UEFA would be able to stigmatize the organization of further European league games overseas. In the case of the Villarreal-Barcelona game, that seems to have worked. The cancellation of Villarreal-Barcelona represents the fourth time since 2018 that La Liga has tried—and failed—to hold a match in the U.S. So, disaster averted? Not quite.
At the same time that it gave the green light to Villarreal and Barcelona to play in Miami, UEFA also approved the staging of a Serie A match between AC Milan and Como in Perth next February. For now, that match looks set to go ahead: the government of the state of Western Australia has said it remains “committed” to welcoming the two Italian teams to Perth and satisfying the apparently “huge following” that European football has in that part of the world. (I’ve been to Perth. I did not get the sense that the locals were rabid for a taste of live Italian club football. From my experience, they mostly seemed interested in spending lazy days at the beach and vomiting into gutters around the teenage party district of Northbridge on a Friday night. But this was over a decade ago; maybe things have changed.)
However strenuously UEFA has made the case that these types of mid-season jaunts abroad are bad for the sport, others clearly think otherwise. Even as it was announcing its embarrassing climbdown on the plan to bring Villarreal-Barcelona stateside, La Liga made it clear that the broader project to auction off league games to cities abroad is still very much alive. “Initiatives like this are essential to ensure the sustainability and growth of Spanish soccer,” the league said in a statement. Both the Italian and Spanish Super Cups are already held overseas, in Saudi Arabia. The insistence on pursuing the offshoring of regular league games offers yet more proof, after the failed experiment of the Super League and the creation of new super-competitions like the Club World Cup, of soccer authorities’ determination to shove shitty ideas down an unwilling public’s throat.
Who exactly is this project for? Players and coaches resent it. Domestic fans hate it. And overseas fans? Well, that’s a more complex question. Many non-local fans would be understandably thrilled at the prospect of seeing a live, mid-season league match with real points at stake, but there’s also an awareness among this fan base that the dismemberment of domestic league seasons in Europe into a series of offshore “home” games risks killing the character of the sport and turning live match attendance into another bland and essentially placeless leisure activity on par with a trip to the local escape room. One constituency, however, unconditionally loves the idea of getting European boots on the ground overseas: league administrators.
The enshittification of the big European leagues, especially in countries like Spain and Italy, is not just a revealed cultural preference of their executives; in many ways it’s now a structural imperative created by the encroaching importance of professional owner-investors. Over the past decade, the English Premier League has become truly hegemonic. Much of the global glamour that used to belong to Serie A and La Liga in the 1990s and 2000s has passed to the EPL. In financial terms, the gulf between England and the rest is genuinely astonishing. The Premier League has double the annual revenue of La Liga and Germany’s Bundesliga combined; the aggregate net spend of its 20 clubs over this summer’s transfer window was $1.76 billion, versus $85.2 million for Serie A and $51.3 million for La Liga. The key to this strength, from a financial perspective at least, is the league’s presence in the global media market. The Premier League is now poised to generate almost $3 billion per season from the sale of its overseas TV rights, more than double the amount commanded by La Liga, its nearest competitor. The psychotic determination among league administrators in Spain and Italy to stage games overseas—in the face of the clear unpopularity of this project among domestic fans, managers, and players—is driven by a desire to close the gap separating what are now, effectively, the two tiers of European soccer.
But there’s another layer to consider here, which is the influence of the financial interests behind the leagues themselves. La Liga is now three years into a deal (the “LaLiga Impulso” initiative) with the European private equity giant CVC Capital Partners, which saw the money men commit a little over $2 billion to the league in exchange for an 8.25 percent share of the league’s media and commercial rights revenue over the next 50 years. Everything La Liga now does needs to be understood within the framework of this agreement, and the attendant pressure to create thick and fast income streams for the league’s financial sponsor. CVC has a history of turning sports investments around for a quick buck, often to the detriment of fans and teams. It owned Formula 1 for a decade until selling it to the U.S.-based Liberty Media group in 2016, and this year it sold off a majority stake in Indian professional cricket side the Gujarat Titans at a valuation 30 percent higher than the sum it paid for the team in 2021. The money managers at CVC ran Formula 1 as merciless profiteers, extracting as much cash as possible for themselves and their partners while passing spiraling costs onto teams and fans. In 2013, one team official accused the private equity firm of “raping the sport.”
It’s also interesting to consider what happened after CVC sold Formula 1 to Liberty Media. The new owners brought fresh energy to the competition, embracing new media (even via fairly obvious and rudimentary changes like “making the highlights of each race available for free on YouTube,” which apparently had not occurred to the geniuses at CVC) and launching the Drive to Survive series on Netflix, which has unquestionably played a huge role in pushing Formula 1 to new heights of global popularity. More than anything else, Liberty helped Formula 1 crack the American market. There are now three F1 races held on U.S. soil, which would have seemed ludicrous a few decades ago. It’s this type of success that La Liga and CVC want to replicate. With few exceptions, the story is the same among the clubs themselves, not only in Spain and Italy but in Germany and France as well. In the new era of financial-sporting nihilism that has taken over European soccer (a harbinger, perhaps, of what’s in store for professional leagues in the U.S. that have opened the door to institutional investment), the top clubs are engineered to generate returns for their investors rather than community or connection among fans. The dream of bone-sawing the season off into a series of export-ready stumps did not die with La Liga’s decision to cancel the Miami game; it merely went into hibernation, ready to be reactivated at a later date. Between exploiting the sport and releasing the spigot of the global market, the administrators of Europe’s non-English big leagues appear to have come up with a tantalizing proposition: Por qué no los dos?
The NFL, of course, successfully stages games overseas, but the comparative economics make the prospect of live competition abroad much different for Europe than it is for the monopolistic professional leagues of America. The NFL’s evangelical missions are modest and contained almost by definition; simply by virtue of the size of the American consumer market, domestic viewers and fans remain the focus of the league’s attention. The clubs of Europe operate in a far more competitive environment and address much smaller domestic markets, making the overseas dollar more attractive; the English Premier League now earns more from overseas media rights than it does from its domestic TV deals, which offers a rough sense of how Spain, Italy, and the rest see the path forward. The NFL can afford to go overseas whenever it wants; the Europeans feel like they have to, which creates the real risk that leagues will be torn apart in a desperate quest to monetize the foreign eyeball.
Then there are the cultural differences. Overseas games work for American football in a way that does not necessarily translate to the European context. The local catchment areas of NFL teams are much larger than they are for European football clubs, which means franchises are already set up to cater to a supporter base that mostly lives somewhere else, lessening the cultural shock of a “home” game abroad. European soccer, by contrast, is fun and exciting precisely because of its intense regionalism. For fans living overseas, watching Spanish, Italian, French, or Dutch club matches on TV is somehow transporting; it offers access to the intrigues and hugger-mugger streets of old Europe, or at least a sense of vague emotional proximity to them. We watch European soccer for the quality of the on-field play, yes, but also because of the chaos and romance of match day, even when it’s mediated through a screen: the singing, the ultras and tifosi, the banners and the politics. None of that can survive the 20,000-hour flight to Perth.
It can be easy to make fun of overseas supporters as “plastics” and “tourists,” as the homegrown hard core of the European clubs often does, but these fans (if you’re reading this in the U.S., that means you and me) have every right to be taken seriously, and increasingly they represent a financial prize—thanks above all to the TV deals their loyalty makes financially possible—for those competitions in Europe trying to match the EPL's terrifying success. Throwing non-local fans the bone of an occasional live match might help goose the leagues’ bottom line, but it will also drive a wedge between overseas and domestic supporters, creating all sorts of unpredictable cultural fissures within the clubs themselves. In a way, this risks spoiling the very “brand-building” that the staging of overseas matches is designed to achieve.
It’s also worth asking: What will it do to the grand old teams of Italy and Spain when they’re forced to sell half their home games to the highest bidder in Jeddah, Indianapolis, Brisbane, or Baku? Will the Madrid derby be the same once it’s played in Seattle or Sydney before a crowd of well-mannered marketing execs and wealth management professionals bopping along to "Seven Nation Army" in between sips of their $20 XPAs? As a spectacle and as a cultural artifact, will Roma vs. Lazio last the journey from the kettle of the Stadio Olimpico to the comfortable bath of the Singapore National Stadium? Of course not. These matches will be as echoingly dead as the empty-stadium encounters of the COVID season. Everything that’s beautiful, time-worn, and precious about Europe’s historic clubs will be sacrificed once their players are converted into glorified Harlem Globetrotters. From there the degradation of the competitions they play in will only multiply. Slop documentaries, shoddy in-stadium “experiences,” exclusive opportunities to sit down with the stars, more AI boondoggles, more crypto swindles, more tokens representing nothing, auctions to get access to early ticket sales and raffles to get access to the auctions, scams upon scams upon scams. The horizon of soccer officials’ ideas for shaking down supporters will expand in line with their pay packets.
The vast majority of fans—domestic and offshore—will hate all of this, but there will be enough who go along with these squalid experiments in revenue generation to justify their continuation. For the leagues and the clubs, any extra plop of cash squeezed from the fan base is worth the damage done to footballing heritage. The goal is to make money for the owners, not memories for supporters, and anyone who gets in the way will be roadkill on the journey to fat returns. European soccer has become a racket run for the suits.
