BETTER IMPORTS
While we play real games overseas, like the Yanks in London, we only get exhibitions here
Diego Costa had three goals for Atletico Madrid in the first half of a 7-3 win over Real Madrid. By the second half, a scrum broke out as the heavily-favored Real Madrid struggled to stay in the game. It was a stunning result and the first time the Madrid derby had been played outside Europe, and tens of thousands of fans trekked to MetLife Stadium with their official jerseys serving as a unified advertisement for Real’s official airline.
“Whoever said that was just a friendly is nuts,” said La
Liga North America CEO Boris Gartner. “The reaction we’ve seen from the press in Spain is that was a Champions League game. That’s why we want regular season games here.”
Although one Spanish-language reporter asked Atletico coach Diego Simeone if he thought the team could win La Liga after this victory, the game (with a bizarre NFL-like final score) didn’t actually count in the standings. And that’s just the way it goes for U.S. fans who want to watch the best soccer teams in the world.
While the U.S. professional leagues have been transporting regular-season matches abroad for a decade, the American audience doesn’t get the same courtesy when it comes to world-class soccer like Premier League and La Liga. Instead, International Champions Cup games (sounds important, it’s not) are staged as exhibitions by a soccer promoter called Relevent Sports Group, started by Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.
So why are we exporting real professional sporting events, while importing preseason soccer, and is that dampening the popularity of soccer here?
A little context.
The NFL has held 28 regular season games in London over the last 12 seasons, and it’s a unique scene. Last year at Wembley Stadium in London, west coast fans came all the way over to see Seattle and Oakland, and British fans wore jerseys for every team east of those playing on the field. The boulevard leading to the entrance was packed pregame with Black Hole denizens and Twelfth Men drinking
pints and buying gear.
The NHL, NBA, and MLB have all taken games abroad, and it’s a way of building a fan base and selling the brand (and gear) to them. In a digital age, borders are less meaningful, and international league rights can be carved out, sliced and packaged. For leagues, it’s a lucrative and untapped market.
For example, Sky TV, one of the NFL’s partners in the United Kingdom, puts together programming around the three games it airs live each Sunday. The BBC reruns games later in the week. When games go on sale, the tickets sell briskly, and Wembley is packed. When the NFL initially started going abroad, it was for exhibition games out of season, but fans weren’t as interested.
“They wanted to see games that count,” an NFL spokesperson said, “and that’s why we moved in the direction of midseason games.”
Although it wasn’t a scientific survey, at least one Real Madrid fan — and Adarsh Srinivas of Jersey City has a tattoo to prove his team loyalty — would prefer to see meaningful games in the U.S.
“We would like that better because there is more involved,” Srinivas said. “Right now you play a half and then you sub the starters out.”
At La Liga North America, Gartner is hoping to build the fanbase through Spanish-language programming and appeal. There are a growing number of U.S. fans and many are from Latin America or are first generation. Gartner explained that their first loyalty is to a national team, but their second is likely to a La Liga team.
He said that 30% of the coveted 18 to 34year-old demographic have a Hispanic background. And that’s a good indicator of how the league can grow in North America. “You don’t have to sell them on soccer,” Gartner said. “They grew up on it.”
There are a lot of impediments to getting real matches to the U.S. It starts at the club level — do two Spanish teams want to take a rivalry game away from their hometown fan base? — and moves on through approvals that can include the
league, U.S. Soccer, FIFA and other governing bodies. On the other hand, for the NFL to get buy-in on hosting a game abroad, it needs approval of ownership and a stadium to host it in — a far lower bar.
Relevent is suing U.S. Soccer and claiming that it failed to sanction elite regular-season matches in order to protect Major League Soccer. U.S. Soccer commented on the Relevent suit last April when it was filed, saying that FIFA had jurisdiction on approvals and that U.S. Soccer was following FIFA guidelines in turning down a match the suit details.
This is a tough week for U.S. Soccer, which put out a letter on the USWNT fight for pay equity that was panned by both the women’s union and the men’s, which released a letter in support of its sister team’s fight.
“This is more of the same from a Federation that is constantly in disputes and litigation and focuses on increasing revenue and profits without any idea how to use that money to grow the sport,” the men’s letter read.
U.S. Soccer, a non-profit entity, is being sued by the backto-back World Cup champs alleging that they are not being compensated fairly when compared to the men’s team.
The value of soccer as a property continues to rise. Daniel Sillman, Relevent’s CEO, said you only have to look at the value of media rights to confirm this. The U.S. market is now worth $5 billion he said, when five years ago it was only $50 million. He points to the NBA’s Dream Team in Barcelona for the 1992 Summer Olympics, and how that has yielded, a generation later, an international sport and a domestic league seeded with players from across the globe.
“I don’t think a league match is great just for the International Champions Cup,” Sillman said, “I think, actually I know, it’s great for soccer in America.”