There is nothing new in the idea of a Spanish top-flight match taking place in the United States, not least because it has long been the stated aim of La Liga president Javier Tebas.
Previous indications had been that any such fixture would not take place until the 2025-26 season at the earliest, but speculation about the prospect intensified on Monday when reports suggested the process could be expedited and it could happen as soon as December, in Miami.
The match in question, Barcelona v Atletico Madrid, is currently pencilled in for December 22 and is scheduled to take place at Barcelona’s temporary Montjuic home because the Camp Nou is being redeveloped.
So could the fixture really be switched to the U.S.? What are the motivations behind the idea of playing a La Liga game abroad, what are the issues that might stop it happening and what has the reaction been?
Why do Barca and Atletico want to play a game in the U.S.?
Barca and Atletico would like to play a game in the U.S. for a very simple reason — they think they could make lots of money from it.
Both clubs were previously involved in La Liga-led attempts to play a routine domestic league fixture in the U.S. — Barca against Girona in 2018, and Atletico against Villarreal in 2019.
Barca’s financial problems are well known, and president Joan Laporta has tried many different ways to increase the club’s revenue, including being the only other club besides promoters Real Madrid still involved in the European Super League project.
Atletico’s owners are also open to new income — just this week, they played their first game at the newly-renamed Riyadh Air Metropolitano stadium. Atletico CEO Miguel Angel Gil Marin has become a close ally of La Liga president Tebas, and the club’s director general Oscar Mayo was signed straight from La Liga earlier this year.
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Both Barca and Atletico also have a lot of supporters in the U.S. — and growing revenue from overseas fans is a big part of their future plans.
“(Playing a game abroad) allows us to bring Spanish football closer to our fans who do not live in Spain. It will be a great game, and a marker for the future,” Gil Marin said in 2019 before that attempt was blocked by a Spanish court.
“We agree with everything that supports the club in what it needs, and are ready to compete wherever we have to, whether it’s Arabia or Turkey,” Atletico manager and spiritual leader Diego Simeone said at that time.
Dermot Corrigan
Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid are third in La Liga, seven points behind leaders Barcelona (Flor Tan Jun/Getty Images)
Why is La Liga so keen to take a match abroad?
Playing a Primera Division game overseas has long been part of La Liga president Tebas’ vision of expanding his association’s reach and power.
Tebas’ plans were thwarted in 2018 and 2019 by opposition from then-federation president Luis Rubiales and current Real Madrid president Florentino Perez. Rubiales then brought the Spanish Supercopa to Saudi Arabia, in a deal still under investigation by anti-corruption authorities in Spain. Perez has also pushed the European Super League project.
Playing a match abroad would help La Liga to counteract the big commercial advantage the Premier League has in the U.S. and other markets outside Europe. La Liga has an office in New York, and also regularly organises friendly games for its teams in other continents during the off-season.
Tebas has regularly said — including in two different interviews with The Athletic — that once it is possible for La Liga to play games overseas, it will.
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Since Rubiales fell into disgrace and departure, the relationship between the RFEF and La Liga has improved markedly. An RFEF spokesperson told The Athletic it could not comment on the idea of playing Primera Division games abroad, until they had received an official proposal, which had not yet happened.
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What are the logistical issues with playing a game abroad and how long would it take to organise?
This is pretty much the central question of the piece, in that nobody appears to have a direct answer to it.
La Liga has been seeking to play this game for over half a decade already and the promoter of the imagined events, Relevent Sports, has battled FIFA in the courts to earn the right to do so. The speculation around this very fixture is not new either, as the Spanish website Relevo first reported La Liga had identified the December 22 fixture between Barcelona and Atletico as a potential match to take abroad as far back as August.
Relevent, founded by Miami Dolphins owner and billionaire Stephen Ross, is a media and events company which helped sell La Liga’s television rights in the North American market and has a long-term agreement to grow the Spanish league’s commercial prowess.
Earlier this year, it achieved a breakthrough when FIFA was dropped from the antitrust lawsuit — which remains against the U.S. Soccer Federation — and FIFA announced its intention to review its policies. A resolution was reached between FIFA and Relevent but FIFA was dismissed without prejudice, which means Relevent can reopen action against FIFA at any point, should matters not materialise to their liking.
At the time, Relevent said FIFA would consider “changes to its existing rules about whether games can be played outside of a league’s home territory”.
In May, during the FIFA Congress in Thailand, the FIFA Council approved the formation of a working group to gather further information and issue recommendations on the matter, with the broad external expectation being that it will pave the way towards domestic games being played abroad.
Yet FIFA committed to forming a group of between 10-15 members that would include representatives from member associations, confederations, clubs, leagues, players, supporter organisations, and also private entities engaged in organising international matches or competitions.
The FIFA Council said the working group will make recommendations “in the following months”, yet we are now six months on, and there has been no announcement as to who will be on the working group, whether a working group has been formed or if the working group has made recommendations.
Multiple sources from leagues, federations and private entities — who have an interest in the matters — were contacted by The Athletic on Monday but they all said they had not been kept abreast of the working group’s formation. In the absence of such recommendations being made, it is unclear how exactly FIFA would proceed on this matter.
As of Monday, no application had been submitted to FIFA for this La Liga game to take place in Miami, which would be a logical next step, and we are less than nine weeks away from the scheduled date of the fixture. FIFA was contacted by The Athletic for comment but had not replied at the time of publication.
What is clear is that Barcelona, Atletico, La Liga and Relevent would all like to play the game in the U.S. but the reality is that the current runway of around two months is short to organise and promote what would be a landmark event of a major European league fixture in Miami and the conditions may not be ideal to maximise returns for all involved.
There are further complications, in that U.S. Soccer and MLS have long been opposed to their market shares being cannibalised by outside leagues on U.S. soil, while the RFEF would also need to approve the fixture. The organisation is currently between presidents following the crises that enveloped the federation under Rubiales and then Pedro Rocha, with a new leader to be elected on December 16.
It is unclear as to whether prospective candidates may have diverging views on whether league games should be taken abroad, which may mean it is more democratic to wait on any such decision until the new president is elected, although the RFEF recently sanctioned the Spanish Super Cup to be played in Saudi Arabia in January.
Other concerns may centre on the fact supporters will already have tickets for a match scheduled to take place in Spain in December, while the date of the match itself may also need to change, as Miami Dolphins are due to host the San Francisco 49ers at the Hard Rock Stadium on December 22. La Liga’s U.S. broadcaster ESPN+ has been in favour of bringing a game stateside.
Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium hosted this year’s Copa America final (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
“Our feeling is the property is so important to us and of such stature that we’ll cover them wherever they are,” Tim Bunnell, ESPN’s senior vice-president of programming and acquisition, told The Athletic in August. “If they want to play on Jupiter, we’ll do that too. Every time we can have a match locally, it benefits us. We would love to have a regular-season game here, but we don’t influence them at all — it is up to them.”
For the moment, there is an idea but all kinds of political and administrative questions remain — and there are very few answers.
Considering it is already almost the end of October, the timeframe feels short, to put it mildly, to pull off the type of spectacle Relevent and La Liga would ideally love to create, and it is tempting to wonder whether the parties eager to get the show on the road are seeking to hasten FIFA’s decision-making process.
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How would Barca and Atletico fans react?
There was relatively little protest from Barca or Real Madrid fans when the idea was floated in 2018 and 2019.
More than half of Barca’s matchgoing local club members (socios) have decided against renewing their season ticket while the club is playing a few kilometres across the Catalan capital at their current temporary home of Montjuic, preferring to watch the games on TV instead.
Fans are due to be back at the Camp Nou, which is currently being expensively remodelled, early in 2025. So there would be a logic from Barca’s point of view about playing in the U.S. now, while they are currently away from their ‘real’ home anyway.
Atletico fans would be unlikely to protest too much at playing an ‘away’ game somewhere else. There is not a widespread culture of supporters travelling in Spanish football, and little more than a couple of hundred Atletico supporters would be expected to make the trip to Montjuic in December.
However, the theory of games being played abroad does concern many Spanish fans, including the independent Spanish supporters’ association FASFE.
“As a fans’ organisation, we are completely against playing national competition fixtures outside Spain, whether it is the Supercopa in Saudi Arabia or La Liga in the U.S.,” FASFE told The Athletic. “It seems very rushed to do it in December, given it would require permission from the Spanish federation (RFEF) and the U.S. federation (U.S. Soccer). The truth is we are fed up with Tebas and his insistence on stealing our national competition from us.”
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What’s in it for Miami?
Plenty of money, if organised, promoted and marketed in the most effective way.
We have seen no shortage of major hits in the U.S. when famous European football teams have descended on the continent for pre-season.
Multiple sources told The Athletic this summer that the fixture between Real Madrid and Barcelona in New Jersey at MetLife Stadium constituted a $25m ($19.3m) revenue game — and that was an exhibition match — so it is not hard to imagine how those numbers may be further enhanced when there is actually something riding on it.
The scarcity of competitive games, combined with the willingness of U.S. sports fans to spend big on events, as well as dynamic pricing, may all combine to draw eye-watering numbers.
Hard Rock Stadium has also become a go-to venue for major soccer events, notably fixtures during Copa America last summer, including the final of the tournament, while it will also host matches for both the Club World Cup in 2025 and the World Cup in 2026.
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What do other countries feel about playing games abroad?
England
That depends who you mean by England and whether you ask them in private or publicly.
The University of South Carolina sold out its 77,559-capacity Williams-Brice Stadium for a friendly match between Premier League rivals Manchester United and Liverpool within three hours earlier this year — the pace of ticket sales outdid concerts for Beyonce and Jay-Z at the same venue in 2018. Manchester United and Arsenal sold out MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in the summer of 2023.
The summer friendly between Manchester United and Liverpool attracted huge interest in South Carolina (Grant Halverson/Getty Images)
The appetite is clearly there, and Liverpool chairman Tom Werner said earlier this year he is in favour of bringing a game to the U.S., before the club’s owner John W Henry insisted it is not an idea he supports. Outwardly at least, the Premier League insists it is not in their current plans.
The Premier League’s chief executive Richard Masters said in the summer of 2023: “I was here at the Premier League when the 39th game idea was launched. I’m very much aware of the reaction then (there was vast opposition) and I’m not entirely sure that people’s views have changed.”
Relevent does work with the Premier League, most notably on the Summer Series tournament that launched in 2023, when six Premier League sides played a pre-season competition in the U.S., broadcast by NBC. It is seeking to repeat this in the summer of 2025, with Manchester United and Liverpool among the teams the Premier League is seeking to bring along. Relevent also markets the EFL in North America but insisted recently it is not currently seeking to bring EFL clubs to play competitively in the U.S., despite the growing number of Football League clubs with American investors.
In England, the matter of taking matches abroad remains a tinderbox and the realpolitik of the situation is that it would need La Liga, Serie A and, most likely, UEFA competitions to take games abroad before English football could seriously broach the conversation.
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Germany
The mood is cautious. In September, the DFL — which operates the Bundesliga — signed an agreement with Relevent to build out a presence in North America and, as a first step, stage a pre-season tournament in the summer of 2025 and expand local staff.
But a first step towards what? An interesting question. The biggest clubs, including Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, see touring foreign countries as a commercial necessity, but fan agency — derived from the 50+1 rule — makes sanctioning a regular-season game or even a Super Cup fixture on foreign soil a different issue entirely.
Fernando Carro, CEO of Bayer Leverkusen — who, not coincidentally, are exempt from the 50+1 rule on account of the Bayer Company’s historic patronage — is one of few executives willing to speak publicly.
“It would be an option to host the Super Cup in the U.S. or another country,” he told ESPN in September. “We have to try new things (and) this could be an example of that.”
Politically, even approaching this territory is nearly impossible without fan revolt, and few others have been willing to comment.
Seb Stafford-Bloor
Italy
Italy has long used the Super Cup as its 39th game. It was played in Washington in 1993, Tripoli in 2002, Beijing in 2009, Doha in 2014 and has been expanded for sale to Saudi Arabia, where the first final-four format was held last winter.
In terms of the league, the idea of playing a competitive game abroad has been floated.
For now, though, they have limited themselves to taking their U.S. TV coverage mainstream and putting the occasional game on national television with CBS (rather than behind a paywall on Paramount+), as was the case with Parma-AC Milan in August.
James Horncastle
(Top photo: Diego Souto/Getty Images)
