Preseason wanderings show that soccer clubs are striving to go global

Manchester United kicked off the fi rst of fi ve games in 11 days on their US tour with a win over LA Galaxy at the Stubhub Center in Carson and the crowd were rewarded with a 5- 2 goalfest in favor of the Premier League side. The visitors will see the game as a success but that has little to do with the result or the performance.

Preseason games for Europe’s biggest clubs are no longer just about players regaining fi tness, managers imposing new systems and summer signings gelling into the team. Instead, they are about building the brand and getting it in front of soccer’s emerging markets. That means heading to the US, Asia and Australia.

While they are in the US, United will face another MLS side, Real Salt Lake, on Monday before games against Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester City, in the fi rst Manchester derby to be played overseas. That record would have been last summer in Beijing only for the pitch at the Bird’s Nest to be unplayable.

Chinese fans won’t be seeing the Manchester sides this summer but they get to watch Arsenal face both Chelsea and Bayern Munich, while the latter sides meet later in Singapore where Chelsea will also take on Inter Milan. Arsenal have already checked off two games in Australia – they won them if that matters – before arriving in China.

Global travels in preseason are nothing new – West Bromwich Albion toured China in 1978 while Australia was long established as a tour destination by then – but they were the exception. Now they have the predictability of the Champions League, with the same old teams playing one another merely in new surroundings.

Overseas commercial ventures on the back of such tours have made Manchester United the richest club in soccer, but if they want to overthrow the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees to become the most valuable team in all sports then they need to continue in this vein, as do the other top teams.

Of this season’s Premier League teams only Bournemouth are not playing overseas this summer while Burnley have only traveled as far as Dublin. The rest will take in the US, Asia, Europe, Australia and in the case of Everton a trip to Tanzania. Exciting times for the players, the overseas fans and the moneymen.

Whether all this travel is good for the team in the coming campaign is unclear. Many managers have bemoaned the demands of long- haul preseasons and the commercial commitments while there. There might be some truth to that but given soccer players now essentially play 11 months of the year and have spent what little time off they had crisscrossing the globe, often on commercial ventures of their own, perhaps not.

These annual aff airs are a glimpse into the future. It won’t be long before European soccer takes a leaf out of the NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA in staging competitive fi xtures overseas. Until then the only results that matter are off the pitch.