THE prospect of English Premier League games being played abroad has been raised once again, and recent developments mean league fixtures being hosted in the United States is increasingly possible.

It is the latest case of money-making schemes colliding with the idea of sports clubs as community institutions, some of which attract international interest on the back of their unique identity and charm.

The marketeers see these clubs as nondescript, global entities with no roots, free to disown their community base in order to promote themselves as brands rather than sports clubs. For them, the clubs are just an opportunity to make money.

Of course Premier League games played abroad would make a lot of money. It doesn’t take a visionary entrepreneur to tell us that the biggest teams from Europe are popular around the world. It won’t take some marketing geniuses to sell out a game involving European clubs at a big stadium in the United States or elsewhere in the world.

Teams already embark on successful pre-season tours in many countries during the off-season, providing fans of those clubs throughout the world with a rare opportunity to watch their team in the flesh.

Even if these are not always full-strength sides, and involve players finding fitness and match sharpness before the season proper begins, international supporters flock to these games in their numbers.

Many of those fans would admit that what draws them to these teams in the first place is what they stand for and where they are from — their history, culture, and sense of place.

Regardless of any other issues, a home league game played away from Anfield, Old Trafford, Camp Nou, or San Siro, for example, would not be an authentic “product” anyway.

What a lot of the giddiness around the idea of games abroad ignores, as the potential to make money and fill stadiums is discussed, is that such a practice would gradually erode the characteristics that make these teams what they are. The identity that attracts fans from around the world in the first place.

One game played abroad successfully would be a slippery slope, potentially leading to multiple games played in multiple countries across the globe, removing them from their original locale and gradually chipping away at their character.

Last week, the president of Spain’s La Liga, Javier Tebas, said Spanish league matches could be played in the United States by the 2025/26 season.

“I don’t know when La Liga will play official games abroad, but I think it could be from the 2025-26 season,” Tebas told the Spanish business and finance newspaper, Expansion.

“An official game in the United States would strengthen our position in the North American market, which is the second-largest for La Liga after Spain.

“Other competitive leagues are coming, so we can’t always do the same thing. They would jump ahead of us.”

The possibility of Tebas’s prediction coming true has increased as a lawsuit in the United States has been allowed to proceed by the Supreme Court.

League matches in the United States involving foreign teams have so far been blocked by either Fifa or the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), but the sports entertainment outfit, Relevent Sports Group, which wanted to organise La Liga games on US soil, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Fifa and the USSF on the back of this.

Last Monday the Supreme Court allowed the lawsuit to advance and the issue rumbles on, but and agreement between Relevant and Fifa for the global governing body to withdraw from the suit potentially opens the door for Relevant to get its way.

It has been put forward as part of Relevant’s arguments that preventing teams playing abroad further consolidates a monopoly and stifles competition (they refer to competition in a capitalist free market sense, not a sporting sense) but, if anything, the big teams from already established, popular European leagues playing their games in other countries, encroaching on new markets, would only increase the monopoly they are already reaching in the game.

It would be detrimental to the game from all angles, at home and abroad.

Thanks to the huge sums of money they accrue through broadcast rights for their domestic leagues and the Uefa Champions League, these clubs already dominate the game.

The idea of league games being played overseas, the treatment of clubs as brands, and the pulling up of the ladder ties in with those behind the European Super League, originally proposed in April 2021 and soon quashed, but still hanging around, waiting for an opportunist moment to try again.

It is all linked to the extraction of as much as possible out of these sporting institutions and clubs until there is nothing left to differentiate them, which would be to the detriment of these clubs, other clubs in their associations, their supporters, and the rest of the game as a whole.

There should be plenty of opposition to domestic league and cup games being played abroad as there was to the Super League. 

Media reports concentrating solely on business, financial, and legal matters, and merely stating the monetary benefits and not the potential cultural harm, will only bring it closer to reality, leading decision-makers into believing they can get away with it.

Fans from the United States to England, from Mexico to Spain, should make a stand against it for the good of the game in their own regions and others.