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Momentum grows for playing league matches abroad

Globalisation may be coming to a halt as Trump's tariffs take effect (although even here the picture is more complex than it seems on the surface).  However, in football the geopolitical forces are, if anything, gathering strength.   Their focus may have changed, but they are affecting the game.

European football’s summer transfer laid bare the widening gulf between the English Premier League and everybody else. English clubs, boosted by new overseas TV deals, spent more than those in Spain, Italy, France and Germany combined.

Those leagues aren’t sitting on their hands — all of them are trying to come up with ways to get international football fans interested, in the hope that one day that feeds through to more TV and sponsorship money.

One idea is to ape the NFL’s international series by taking league matches overseas. Summer tours have been going on for years, and both the Italian and Spanish “super cups” are currently staged in Saudi Arabia. But playing a proper competitive domestic match outside Europe would break a long-standing taboo.

The plans are gathering steam. The December match between Barcelona and Villarreal is scheduled to take place in Miami, while AC Milan are slated to play local rivals Como in the Australian city of Perth next year. A nod from Uefa could come next week.   (When I first heard of this, I thought it was a joke. OK, Perth is a great city, and in Freo there are plenty of people of Italian descent, but it's remote even in Australia).

Yet the backlash has been strong. This week more than 400 fan groups signed an open letter warning that moving games abroad was a similar “existential threat” to the one posed by the European Super League.

“Clubs are neither entertainment companies nor travelling circuses”, the groups said. “It risks surrendering our clubs and our leagues to the will of entertainment companies, dictatorships, or vulture funds, whose interests in taking European football away from its home go against the very fabric of our sport.”  Yet do fans call the shots or billionaires and petro states?

Vocal critics of the proposals include Real Madrid and the European Commission, while Uefa says it is “not happy” but has limited powers to intervene.

English football’s financial dominance is not new, but it is getting more pronounced. That’s why Europe’s other leagues are pulling whatever levers they can find. The German league, for example, has just agreed to hand live broadcast rights in some markets to a handful of YouTubers, including grumpy Manchester United fan Mark Goldbridge and Gary Neville’s The Overlap.

But having been left behind in the global battle for eyeballs, Europe’s other big leagues are starting from a position of weakness. The Premier League’s international strength has been years in the making, and aided by long-term partnerships with the likes of NBC in helping to market the competition in the US.

Will any of this actually work? It’s impossible to know. But doing nothing is no longer seen as an option.

 


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