Given the way Villarreal performed in their previewed home game, there must be plenty of loyal fans wishing they had, after all, been able to get their 20% season ticket discount and allow their team to shoot 7,500km to Miami. They were well-chosen games to sell for several million dollars. With some due disrespect, Villarreal’s top fans aren’t the hardest. And the yellow submarine haven’t won the game since 2007 when their goals were scored by Marcos Senna, who is now the club’s World Ambassador, and Santi Cazorla, (check notes) who is now a La Liga midfielder. Today’s Villarreal fan is offered huge bribes to miss his home game: free tickets to HardRock Stadium, flights, the like, discounts on season tickets. It was the wider football community who were outraged by the decision taken by the Relevent promoters to decide that it was inappropriate.
Spare a thought for the unlucky American fan. They missed out on witnessing up close and personal the joys of Nicolas Pepe missing from six yards, Santi Comesana giving away a penalty that was completely avoided, and Renato Veiga trying to cut Lamine Yamal in half. Barcelona were not happy but it was their ninth game in a month and resumed after the November break; how much better would they have been with an extra eleven hour flight?
https://twitter.com/barcacentre/status/2003025411236856252?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
It’s not like American football fans are given the opportunity to watch this game with their own eyes. Last summer’s Club World Cup was in the USA, most of the Club World is next summer, and all of Europe’s big clubs seem eager to get a head start on their post-season and/or pre-season tours, before heading home to complain about the traffic jams for the next nine months. Believe me, the American soccer nut will see a lot of content about the good round soccer game and hear a lot of Donald Trump’s non-anecdote interpretations about Pele before the summer of ’26 is out.
So, if Americans didn’t need Villarreal-Barcelona, does Spanish football need them? Apparently, La Liga and Javier Tebas think so. There is money in America, if you know where to look, and fans tend to pay cheap prices to watch sports. Tebas is motivated by a sense of grievance about the wealth of the Premier League and thinks that selling the game here will give him useful fuel in his pursuit of the rich English. Note: here “English” can refer to football clubs owned by American billionaires and Middle Eastern oil states. Is making money the main goal of football managers?
The Spaniards have not been able to compete with the eye-watering fees paid by TV fans in the UK and Ireland or match the appeal of the Premier League to a global audience, despite the allure of La Liga’s smaller, attractive games offered as independent games every Friday and Monday evening. So, how to close that gap? Was there a hope that passing billionaires might stop by HardRock Stadium and decide to buy Getafe or Levante?
You see, in the world of football everything is for sale. How can the competition be improved? Lots of games, of course. And why don’t you see that you can take it to Saudi Arabia, or Qatar, or the private island of millionaires? Maintenance times? Well, let’s imagine that the Chinese are eager to watch Rayo Vallecano versus Mallorca and put it on Sunday lunchtime. Field names? Sold. FC Barcelona’s future income? Yours, at the right price. Even turning off the TV for supporters in the stadiums is an opportunity for publicity; the good-looking young tourists look better than the wrinkled locals.
As a child from England I grew up with English football. What first attracted me to watching football in other countries was not the similarities but the differences. In Spain, that meant that the story of Barcelona’s football was linked to the resistance to the Franco regime, it meant that the Basque players in the Basque clubs, and Real Madrid as a symbol of glamor and stars on Saturday or Sunday night, while the England players were in the pub. It was slower but smarter than what I was used to watching. I don’t want Spanish football to look like football in all other countries.
There are good things about internationalism, but who wants an amorphous global mush where we all do the same things and act the same way? Diversity is as much about preserving differences as it is about celebrating new ideas. I don’t want Americans, petrodollars, or the financing of Spanish football. And I don’t want a European or Global Superleague, and if that means people with a direct economic interest in La Liga have to get rich little by little, that’s a sacrifice I’m happy for them to make. Sunday’s game wasn’t perfect, but I’m glad it was played in front of 21,000 fans in a sleepy Vila-real.