TThe dream – or nightmare – of a 39th Premier League match in America has come a little closer. After reaching a settlement with US promoter Relevent Sports, FIFA said last week it will consider changes to its policy to prevent league matches from being played outside the league’s home country. The indication that FIFA’s thinking on this issue could be developing in a more flexible direction will be welcomed by Europe’s top clubs and deplored by football traditionalists.
For clubs, the commercial arguments are clear. This is an argument anchored not in culture, but in money. The work of evangelising football is already done; the sport is not like, say, American football, or rugby league, or basketball, or even cricket, which still scour the world for converts and regularly hold matches abroad. In the world of professional sports, football is number 1 and probably always will be. Carrying parts of the European domestic season offers a juicy financial opportunity, freeing up valuable revenue to help weather the storm of a newly restrictive regulatory environment and bring teams closer to the millions of football fans living outside Europe.
Cup competitions are already organized away from home – for example, the Italian and Spanish football federations have sold the hosting rights for their second division cups to Saudi Arabia – and top clubs regularly tour America and Asia in pre-season. Theoretically, it is only a small step towards moving league matches abroad. Barcelona tried to organize a La Liga match against Girona in Miami in 2018, which led to the Relevant lawsuit. These could happen anywhere, but the Gulf and the US seem the most likely destinations.
Hosting a 39th match in America has long been a fever dream of the Premier League. The idea was suggested and abandoned in the 2000s, causing such a strong backlash that the project is still around today own Wikipedia page. More recently, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has proposed his state – now confirmed as the venue for the 2026 World Cup finals – as the ideal stage for an overseas extension of England’s top-flight season. As anyone who saw the hordes of Premheads begged for a word of acknowledgment from [checks notes] Joleon Lescott in the background of NBC’s recent Premier League fan fest in Nashville can testify that even a crumb of contact with the flesh and blood of European club soccer is enough to send the average American soccer fan into a burst of delight. Just imagine the scenes when these fans get the chance to watch Nicolas Jackson and Noni Madueke squabble over the penalty spot in a real, points-on-the-table league match. Riots, mass fainting, Cole Palmer commuting the sentence instead: anything is possible.
Once the North London derby is successfully grafted onto Northern New Jersey, who can say where the quest for money will take professional football? Compared to American professional sports, which have mastered the art of turning every moment of the sporting season into a revenue-generating spectacle, the big old clubs of Europe are relatively inexpert at extracting value from off-the-field events. Once all those league draws, transfer windows and points deductions have been converted into revenue-generating units for the overseas fanbase, we could be just a few years away from the Premier League’s independent committees handing over their financial statements to Madison Square Garden,” Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino presents the Progressive Insurance Winter Transfer Deadline Day!”, or a special PGMOL meet and greet on the Jeddah Corniche (tickets required, respect for VAR optional).
Traditionalists will be baffled by these suggestions, and rightly so. Football, perhaps more than any other sport, has a powerful sense of place, whose traditions and rituals are inextricably linked. Manchester United versus Liverpool at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field may be a good thing, but it’s no longer really the same game; it’s football, stripped down and kitschy, stripped of the real stakes that remain vital to the sport’s enduring cultural power. It’s football, but not really from England anymore; it is the Global English Premier League, an expendable asset and a floating signifier that can be taken from its homeland and plugged into any clime at any time and for any purpose. In other words, it is sport from scratch.
This is the story usually told in contrast to “Game 39” and similar plans to send domestic leagues abroad for a week – that splitting these leagues into standalone, export-quality packages violates heritage and disrespects the home fanbase . But hosting a game day in a Texas or Miami suburb would, I think, also do a disservice to football fans abroad.
It is important to emphasize that these events would be crazy popular. After years of living on the weak sauce of preseason tours and B-list friendlies, most fans outside Europe would of course be thrilled at the chance to see a legitimate league match live. But removing the distance that separates the ‘foreign’ fan from the real thing – the live match, the stadium experience, the massed ranks cooing in the stands – would, I think, also undermine the romance of watching football abroad destroy. The beauty of enjoying these matches from a distance lies precisely in the distance the spectator has from the action – in the idea of Europe and European football that non-European fans build for themselves. Fan culture in the world outside a club’s traditional ground has a texture all its own, and is no less beautiful or valid for its mutation from the norms established on the home ground.
When I’m not watching at home, I watch most of my live European club football in a bar in Brooklyn. The group identities of the fans who gather there bear some similarity to those of their native counterparts, but there are also important differences; a Manchester United fan in the suburbs of New York is never exactly the same as a Manchester United fan in Manchester (or – honk – London for that matter). Each of the fan groups at my bar in Brooklyn has its own strange charisma. The Chelsea fans: a mix of high school history teachers, drug dealers and statistical bores who are frighteningly available for every match on the calendar. The Spurs fans: part-time DJs and wannabe edgelords with strong opinions about breakfast tacos. The Arsenal fans are usually too tired to watch their team; On the rare occasion you’ll see one or two slumped at the bar, grumbling about Emile Smith Rowe’s lack of minutes, raising an avuncular, seen-before “Arsenal, Arsenal” every time Martin Ødegaard takes a dart inside. The only known Manchester City fan has a habit of shouting “ROBOT” when Erling Haaland scores. Whether in New York, Nebraska, Kentucky or Kuala Lumpur, overseas fan culture is as sensitive to the vagaries of place as the fan culture in the ‘sending’ city.
The moment the Premier League becomes an American live entertainment on par with any other, it will inevitably lose some of its distant luster – it will just be another role at the buffet. And the fans who watch English matches on American TV every week will also lose some of their strange charm.
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The cultural damage will, of course, extend in the other direction, as the frothing Atlanticists who run the Premier League rush to sex the product with a generous injection of American Cringe. Live performances of the American and British national anthems before every match, half-time shows with increasingly desperate talent bookings, mascots and brass bands: make no mistake, once the English top flight arrives in the United States, we’ll be in for all this, and more. The Premier League is not yet so culturally confident that Pat McAfee won’t go all out at the first sight of Rockaway Beach. And this is before we even get to the Instagram content: Haaland jaws into a smoked beef rib next to a legendary pitmaster of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Palmer on the Hollywood Walk of Fame gives a pale thumbs up under the California sun, Bruno Fernandes strolling along the Jersey Shore. It hasn’t even started yet and I already want it to end.
A 39th Premier League round in America would humiliate everything associated with it: the teams that travel here, the local fans, the league itself. A league that has already lost a large part of its soul would be one step closer to spiritual oblivion. There’s one thing European football – intimate, atavistic, elegant and proud – isn’t built to survive, and that’s the 90-minute commute from downtown Manhattan to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
If the Premier League has any sense, it will resist the mad urge to extend its season abroad. Some things just don’t belong together. You can’t force a beaver to have sex with a giraffe. (Well, you probably can, but you shouldn’t.) You also shouldn’t let Europe’s top clubs ‘work’ in front of a live audience in America, or Saudi Arabia, or wherever. These clubs, and the sagas of athletic daring and desperation they produce every week, already work for millions of football fans beyond the borders of Europe. European football does not need Americanization any more than American football fans need Europeanization. Not everything needs to be chopped up and made digestible for the American consumer. America is, even if only occasionally, able to keep its distance and appreciate beauty from afar.