La Liga’s recent announcement that it was abandoning its long-in-the-works plan to hold a regular-season match between Villarreal and Barcelona in Miami this December seemed to represent a victory of common sense over greed. The brainchild of league president Javier Tebas and U.S.-based sports promoter Relevent, the scheme to bring real blood-on-the-grass Iberian club soccer to America was hated by pretty much everyone else associated with it at a professional level in Spain. Supporter groups were unrelenting in their criticism of the idea. Barcelona manager Hansi Flick repeatedly expressed his displeasure at the prospect of having to travel almost 5,000 miles for the match, which would be a clear drain on his squad’s energy in the middle of a hectic season. Players from all teams across the league staged several on- and off-field protests in opposition to the plan.
Even UEFA, hardly a body hostile to the cause of European club football’s crass commercialization, was opposed, only agreeing to the plan “reluctantly” as a compromise to avoid the possibility of a legal showdown with Relevent—and to give itself time to plug gaps in the regulatory framework that allow schemes to play overseas to occupy, for now at least, a kind of legal penumbra. “League matches should be played on home soil; anything else would disenfranchise loyal match-going fans and potentially introduce distortive elements in competitions,” UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin observed, correctly, while announcing his organization’s approval of the game. The hope, clearly, was that by sternly registering its distaste, UEFA would be able to stigmatize the organization of further European league games overseas. In the case of the Villarreal-Barcelona game, that seems to have worked. The cancellation of Villarreal-Barcelona represents the fourth time since 2018 that La Liga has tried—and failed—to hold a match in the U.S. So, disaster averted? Not quite.
