La Liga Is Playing A Match In America. Should Premier League Fans Start Panicking?
La Liga has announced plans to grow its profile in North America which includes playing a regular league game in the USA, possibly as early as this year.
It's a huge statement of elite European football's globalised stature, though obviously it won't happen without the intervention of #contraelfútbolmoderno types and the Spanish equivalent of Terry Butcher complaining about how el juego es goneo.
But should Premier League fans in England be worried? It feels, instinctively, like one of the worst things that could happen to English football. Remember the endless rumbling about Game 39, the 2008 proposal that the Premier League could just bodge another fixture onto the end of the league season and play it somewhere overseas? That was clearly mad and unworkable, but it hung around at committees and meetings in various forms until 2010. There's appetite in some corners of the FA to make it work, though a comparable plan to La Liga's hasn't been seriously floated since 2014.
The conditions are different, though. For one thing, the Spanish-language audience in the United States, especially in the southern states, is a big draw for La Liga. It's an audience which tends to be into football, and is one big reason David Beckham wanted to base his MLS team in Miami. Names reportedly under consideration for that team, by the way, include Atletico Miami and Internacional Club De Fùtbol Miami. They know who they're targeting, and La Liga presumably want tap the same market. It's there to be had, too: the La Liga game between Barcelona and Atletico Madrid in March drew 752,000 viewers on American television, nearly beating last season's MLS Cup final figures.
That's not a link the Premier League has to work with, and it averaged about 450,000 viewers a game last season. While 101,000 came out in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to watch Manchester United and Liverpool at this summer's pre-season not-a-real-cup International Champions Cup, average attendances were down from nearly 50,000 to below 40,000. That might suggest that seeing Premier League teams in the flesh doesn't quite have the glamour it once did, or at least that your instinct about Southampton v Wolves being a tricky sell to sports fans in Jacksonville is probably right.
That said, there's little chance of the Premier League not leaping on board if it goes well for La Liga. Even if there's doubt over whether the games themselves would sell out, any opportunity to bank TV money and grow brand awareness would be enough inducement for teams like United - with commercial partners including Gulf Oil International (Official Global Lubricant Partner) and Mlily (Official Global Mattress and Pillow Partner) - to want to get involved.
We can expect a full-on football onslaught before the 2026 World Cup is held in North America too, so this is unlikely to be the last overture made by a European league to North America. That said, this is happening because La Liga wants to catch up to the Premier League's commercial clout; the Premier League doesn't have the same impetus right now. English fans shouldn't be worried yet, but if it goes well for La Liga it'll be a matter of time before the Premier League comes knocking too.
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