Can games in London be pathway to European growth?
LONDON >> London seems like a nobrainer for a European road trip. Paris is all but assured next. Why not throw in Germany and the Netherlands?
Major League Baseball has big plans for Europe, starting with an English reintroduction to the sport this weekend when the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs play a two-game series in London.
The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox featured in London four years ago, smashing six home runs in a European debut for MLB that was higher scoring — the Yankees won 1713 — than the NFL’s first one in London in 2007, when the New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins 13-10.
Though the coronavirus pandemic threw a curveball — the Cards-Cubs series was slated for 2020 — the success of the World Baseball Classic has provided a boost. Britain won a game at the tournament for the first time and found a star in Seattle Mariners prospect Harry Ford, who was born in Atlanta but has parents from the U.K.
“The U.K. has really been identified for us, London in particular, as the jumping off point for us to get into Europe,” Chris Marinak, MLB’s chief operations and strategy officer, told The Associated Press. “We feel like we proved that out in 2019. By coming back and having a really strong showing ... we’re going to have the opportunity to really make some headway for growth both in the U.K. and throughout Europe.”
Britain is MLB’s biggest market in Europe in terms of broadcast revenue, merchandise sales and subscribers to digital products, though it trails the likes of Mexico, Japan, South Korea, China and Australia.
Audience research company GWI’s data showed that interest in baseball among British sports fans increased from 4% in 2019 to 5.9% last year, the league said. It added that MLB Europe’s social media channels since the 2019 series have more than tripled their followers to 452,000.
The New York-Boston series, a twogame set that drew nearly 119,000 fans to London Stadium, was a driver in the BBC signing a deal last fall to begin broadcasting a handful of games, including the London series, each season. MLB’s lead broadcaster in the U.K., the pay-TV service BT Sport, last year renewed its agreement to broadcast 15 games per season.
“We feel like the U.K. offers us a good model for growth in the Europe market,” Marinak said.
MLB’s first regular-season game outside of the United States — including Puerto Rico — and Canada was in 1996 when the New York Mets and San Diego Padres played a three-game series in Monterrey, Mexico. The league has also staged games in Tokyo and Australia. Earlier this season, Mexico City hosted a two-game series between the Padres and San Francisco Giants.
The Yankees are lobbying to play in Paris in 2025. The league hasn’t announced the City of Light just yet, but Marinak noted: “We see a lot of engagement in France.”
London is locked in for a series next year and another in 2026.
The Netherlands — bolstered by baseball’s popularity in Aruba and Curacao — and Italy boast the best national teams in Europe, though the Czech Republic is improving. Germany — which has become the NFL’s leading market in Europe — has a big U.S. military presence and has produced several big leaguers, including Minnesota’s Max Kepler.
“We’ve really focused on looking into Europe as once a year, maybe max twice a year ... just because it’s such an effort to get over there, and it doesn’t really fit into the normal cadence of the major league schedule, but we really do think it’s important to bring live game content to the market,” Marinak said.
“We want to hit our priority markets but we may rotate around to a Germany in the long run or if there’s a facility in the Netherlands that we could potentially look at, France we’ve talked about, the UK,” he continued. “But for the medium term we’re really focused on the UK as our primary vehicle.”
A suitable venue is the tricky part. Olympic-style, multi-use stadiums are possibilities, like Stade de France. Baseball was a demonstration sport at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin’s Olympiastadion. Renovating the Sydney Cricket Ground for the Australia series in 2014 “was sort of a complicated endeavor,” Marinak said.