What Does Serie A and La Liga Playing Games Abroad Mean For the Future of Football?
This week marked the genesis of a new era in European football as we know it. For anyone who may have missed the news, which has flied surprisingly under the radar, UEFA confirmed (albeit with deep regret) that two domestic league games from the Serie A and La Liga will happen abroad as in December, Miami will host Villarreal and Barcelona whilst early in 2026, Perth, Australia will play host to AC Milan vs Lake Como.
According to UEFA’s statement, these have been granted on an ‘exceptional basis’. Time will tell if the exception comes to be quite the norm.
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Americanisation
This new dawn on European football could be aptly described as an Americanisation of the beautiful game. For example, The NFL, as its commissioner Roger Goodell states is a ‘global [commercial] product’ and hence has been ‘exported’ to London (3 times a season), Dublin, Madrid, Berlin and Sao Paulo.
To criticise this move from the NFL would be greatly hypocritical and ironic of me, considering I have attended 4 of these games at Wembley, and look forward to watching the Jacksonville Jaguars face the Los Angeles Rams at Wembley in a week’s time. I, like the over 250,000 fans who will have attended the London games alone this year, would deem the NFL’s choice to move the games abroad a grand success. Approximately speaking, across all the international games, it is likely the NFL reaches around a million people in stadia, let alone the additional TV audiences this generates.
Football and Football
However, as I imagine you’re keen to remind me, whilst they both (arguably) share the name ‘football’, the NFL and ‘association football’ (for means of clarity) are contrastingly different sports, particularly in terms of their constitution and organisation.
The NFL, with College Football as its natural predecessor, is the bona fide major league and thereby outright channel of professional football (albeit minor leagues exist). The structure of the league is closed and thus the risk of relegation is non-existent. Irrespective of how dire a team is, their space back in the league the year after is guaranteed. Commercially, this provides an unwavering certainty to each and every franchise on a year-to-year basis.
Football, particularly the domestic leagues across Europe, is the antithesis of this. With a growing impasse and divergence between the Premier League and the EFL becoming a recognisable pattern across the continent, the repercussions of relegation may never have been more impactful. Commercially speaking, hundreds of millions of pounds/euros are on the table, a loss of revenue which bleeds into every sector of a football club’s operation, not least its year-to-year sustainability.
This distinction, in terms of the nature of the leagues is, in my opinion, an under-examined facet of this argument. Whilst, in theory, every franchise is motivated to do well, the effects to performance by playing games away from home is simply not as vital for the functioning of the franchise as it may prove for the financial sustainability of a football club. As UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin states ‘anything else would disenfranchise loyal match-going fans and potentially introduce distortive elements in competitions.’
Relocation, a truly American phenomenon
The more obvious distinction to be made between football and American sports is in terms of the fungibility and volatility of the team’s locations. It is totally incomprehensible that an English, Italian or Spanish football team would uproot and move elsewhere. However, fans of the San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders, St Louis Cardinals, Baltimore Colts or Houston Oilers would tell you a very different story. The risk of relocation is an inevitable truth of supporting an American sports team and this perhaps explains why American fans are more receptive to games being moved abroad than their European or English counterparts.
The only analogous and comparable situation to the plethora of American relocations is the MK Dons & Wimbledon dynamic. Whereby, the owners of MK Dons (previously called Wimbledon) opted to move against the will of the fans which led to the inauguration of the ‘phoenix’ club of AFC Wimbledon. This rivalry is still an enormously contentious one—and one does not foresee a likeminded decision being made by another Football league owner.
This continental Americanisation is mimetic of a wider trend in the business of football domestically. At the time of writing, 11 Premier League teams are owned predominantly by Americans with a further third in the championship, including my beloved Norwich City.
Motivations for the move
This decision taken by the Spanish and Italian Football Associations is indicative of a point of inflexion between loyalty to longstanding fans and the appetite to expand globally; it appears these two bodies have acted in favour of the latter. The question then lies as to what is the most motivating aspect for their decision?
The realist would point to the commercial opportunity that the move provides, with La Liga and Serie A continuing to be cut adrift from the influx of revenue into the Premier League, this move can be perceived as a lunge to compete with the Premier League for the benefit of the overall organisation’s bottom line. To some, this will be seen a reasoned and wise move to propel Spanish and Italian clubs to the forefront of European competitions again. By contrast, fans, UEFA and players alike will likely see this as a sell-out by the football associations, putting lucrativeness over loyalty.
The counterargument to this is that the Spanish and Italian decision-makers are trying to make the game more accessible, akin to the NFL’s international offering. Whilst this argument is a valid one, if the underlying motivation is to diversify the game , some of the most football-hungry markets are India or Indonesia. I do not mean to discredit the football-lovers in Miami or Perth, but it is a straightforward conclusion to draw that in terms of profitability alone, the latter are more profitable commercial endeavours. If profits weren’t the focus, the former may well have been favoured.
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A Domestic Outlook
To be fair to the FA and the powers that be in the Premier League, they have done relatively well. That is not to say they haven’t explored America and Australasia as a commercial option, rather that they have done well in constraining themselves to pre-season or ‘Summer Series’ options—the merits of which is no doubt a topic for discussion in a separate article entirely. Perhaps, this move should have been more foreseeable considering that Spain and Italy had already hosted their ‘Super Cups’, the Community shield equivalent, away from their homelands.
For Premier League fans, it appears there is no such move in the pipeline, irrespective of the influx of American capital into the league. In 2008, the concept of a ‘39th game’ away from England was flirted with by executives. Needless to say, it did not sit well with impassioned English fans. As new regulation dawns on English football with the enactment of the Football Governance Act and the inauguration of the Independent Football Regulator, it is tough to foresee any plans to move Premier League or EFL games abroad materialise. This sentiment is shared by Richard Masters, Chief Executive of the Premier League, who has reiterated that there is no plans to replicate the decision of their Spanish and Italian equivalents.
Closing Remarks
I’ve attempted to remain as neutral as I can throughout. I believe this issue boils down to the paradigm which you see it through. One of profit or progress? Exploitation or evolution? Demise or development?
By: Max Nicholls / @maxnicholls14
Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Jonathan Moscrop / Getty Images