It’s been coming for quite some time, but we may finally have reached the point where elite-level football in Europe starts to eat itself.
The continent’s top clubs already spend much of the summer trailing around Asia and the Americas participating in an ‘International Challenge Cup’ of overblown friendlies, designed primarily to fill their bank accounts rather than prepare players for the season ahead. Now, in an unprecedented experiment, the Spanish clubs Girona and Barcelona will play a competitive, top-flight domestic league game outside Spain, in Miami Florida, this January.
Though La Liga is the first of Europe’s top leagues to actually schedule a match abroad, the idea was previously discussed most seriously in England. In 2008, the Premier League proposed adding an ‘international round’, or ‘Game 39’, to the usual 19 home and 19 away fixtures, but Sepp Blatter and FIFA reportedly expressed their opposition to the plan. If Girona vs. Barcelona in the US goes ahead with the governing body’s acquiescence, will club chairmen in England revive their own madcap scheme?
It’s hard to overstate how much this kind of experiment revolts genuine football fans. Their patience has already been tested in the modern era by overpriced tickets, unsympathetic scheduling of fixtures and sterile, sanitised stadiums. Interfering with the hallowed ritual of the home match is vandalism of an entirely different magnitude.
Girona FC is an unfashionable neighbour of Catalan giants, Barcelona. The club is playing only its second season in the Spanish top flight and this fixture, considered a local derby, will have been the most eagerly awaited match of Girona’s season. Now it has been relocated to a different continent, to be played at a gridiron arena, the horribly named ‘Hard Rock’ Stadium.
Spanish sports media report that the club will offer 1,500 free flights to season ticket holders, who will be required to pay only a refundable £450 deposit. That obviously leaves supporters who take up the deal with a variety of additional expenses, like hotels, meals and transport. There’s also an option to recoup a generous percentage of the cost of a season ticket or accept one of 5,000 complimentary seats for the return match at Camp Nou. For true fans, though, no inducement could compensate for missing out on hosting Messi, Suarez and co. at the team’s intimate 13,500 capacity stadium.
Girona’s fanbase can hardly be entirely surprised by this development, given recent history. The club has made exactly the type of compact with investors that modern football supporters crave, because it can bring big name players and success, and dread at the same time, because inevitably it erodes the history and traditions associated with their team.
Girona FC is part-owned by the ‘City Football Group’, a vehicle for Middle Eastern and Chinese investment that owns a stable of football clubs across the globe, the most prominent of which is Manchester City. This type of arrangement is particularly loathed by traditionalists, because it distorts competition and makes explicit the unpalatable fact that clubs are merely businesses in the eyes of their owners.
Manchester City may be Premier League champions, thanks to lavish funding by Sheikh Mansour and his associates, but the common sight of thousands of empty seats at the Etihad Stadium shows that supporters’ allegiances can’t be easily bought and sold. That may be part of the reason why many clubs seem focussed on enhancing their appeal in ‘emerging markets’ in Asia and the US. The lure of selling vast quantities of merchandise to fans in China or India, who follow matches mainly on satellite TV or the internet, becomes a greater priority than providing a compelling, affordable experience for spectators at home, who demand a certain amount of respect and input, in return for their loyalty.
The idea of taking top level domestic sporting events to different countries was conceived in the United States and proponents cite the supposed success of NFL (American Football) and NBA (basketball) matches in London and elsewhere. However, the biggest teams in US sports are nearly all franchises of larger organisations and it is not uncommon for them to change names or even move to different cities entirely.
By contrast, while football has long been a multi-billion pound business and the top teams are supported by fans all over the world, its enduring appeal rests on clubs that are firmly rooted in local communities and intimately connected with their home cities. If the game is considered a product, it will become much less compelling when ties of culture, neighbourhood and civic pride are diluted.
The most significant football matches are elevated above more anodyne sporting contests thanks to an atmosphere generated by core groups of supporters, who understand instinctively the traditions of their club, the rituals of the terraces and the gravity of the occasion. It can be raw and even rather alarming, but it can never be fabricated or recreated thousands of miles from home.
It’s a relief that the Miami experiment is being conducted by Spanish rather than English clubs, but it might easily have been the other way around. If the Premier League decides to follow La Liga’s example, it will undermine the authentic qualities that make English football so popular around the world. It might be a vain hope, but it would be nice if, for once, the clubs are guided by the best interests of their sport, rather than short-term commercial considerations.
