Clever scheduling from La Liga can make Barcelona and Real Madrid games in US a successful venture

Andy West 16:22 17/08/2018
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  • Champions again?

    La Liga’s announcement that it plans to stage games in the United States is hardly surprising, and it is hardly a new idea.

    Whether traditionalists like it or not, modern elite football is very much a global affair. Fans routinely tune into games from all over the world, and match-going supporters are now just a small (if crucial) part of a much bigger overall picture.

    Barcelona, for example, boast 28.9 million followers on their English-language Twitter feed, compared to just 5.6 million in their native Catalan tongue. They are very much an international entity, and their business operations should reflect that reality.

    Clubs and leagues have accepted this for a long time, and are already making strenuous efforts to engage with their followers in far-flung locations.

    Pre-season overseas tours, for example, have become a matter of routine for top-flight football clubs, while the NBA and the NFL have been staging competitive regular season games on foreign shores for many years.

    The idea, then, that Barcelona might face Real Betis in Florida rather than Catalonia or Andalusia is not exactly revolutionary, and on many levels it makes perfect sense both in terms of business and in terms of reflecting the identity of contemporary football.

    La Liga, especially the big clubs, have plenty of fans overseas who would love to watch the team. And although clubs should of course be based in their home town or city rather than becoming a rootless Harlem Globetrotter style travelling band, a rare and occasional venture to another location does not really dilute the overall essence of what that club ‘means’. If anything, it strengthens it.

    Like many ideas, the success of La Liga’s latest plan will be determined by whether it is executed well. And this, rather than the idea itself, is the key.

    Many objections have already been raised, the most valid of which is the unfair treatment of season ticket holding fans who will be denied the chance to watch a game they have already paid for.

    That is a fair complaint, especially for fans of smaller clubs where the annual visit of Barcelona and Real Madrid is a genuine highlight in the calendar. Loyal fans of their local teams should not be harmed by a marketing strategy which will benefit their opposition more than their own club.

    Therefore, to use the example cited above, the kind of game selected should be Barcelona vs Real Betis rather than Real Betis vs Barcelona.

    Of course, many Barca fans would object but, to be frank, they wouldn’t really miss a home game against someone like Betis. They have many bigger occasions to enjoy every season, and the swathes of empty seats at the Camp Nou for most home games – despite the presence of thousands of tourists – shows that most season ticket holding Barca fans are selective about the games they attend.

    Another crucial consideration is the scheduling, with one obvious complaint being that staging a game in a neutral venue would detract from the symmetry of the competition.

    But that supposed ‘symmetry’ is an illusion, with countless factors constantly intervening to prevent any league from being truly ‘fair’. This weekend, for example, Real Madrid will play their opening league game just three days after contesting an intense 120 minutes Super Cup in eastern Europe, whereas their opponents Getafe have been given a full week to prepare.

    That’s not ‘fair’ on Madrid, but there are many more examples of the league not being as symmetrical as we sometimes like to think.

    Playing one game overseas would just be another in the long list of distortions of the league’s non-existent ‘fairness’, but of course that distortion should be minimised by clever scheduling.

    In the NFL, for instance, teams playing in London are then given a bye week. They don’t exist in football, but international breaks do. And if Barcelona against Betis are scheduled to play in Miami just before a set of international games which would require many of their players to cross the Atlantic anyway, another objection would be smoothed down.

    Lots of good decisions have to be taken to make this idea a success, and it will be impossible to make everyone happy with it. But there are undeniable benefits, and just because it’s never been done before that doesn’t mean it should be automatically discarded. It’s just modern life.

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