An American Premier League match would be wildly popular and degrade everyone | first division

the dream (or nightmare) of playing the 39th Premier League match in the United States has come a little closer. After reaching an agreement with American promoter Relevent Sports, FIFA flagged it last week will consider changes to its policy to prevent league games from being played outside the league's country of origin. The indication that FIFA's thinking on the issue may be evolving in a more flexible direction will be welcomed by Europe's top clubs and deplored by football traditionalists.

For the clubs, the commercial argument is clear. This is an argument anchored not in culture but in money. The work of evangelizing football is already done; The sport is not like American football, let's say, or rugby league, or basketballeither even cricket, who are still scouring the world for converts and regularly hold matches abroad. In the world of professional sports, football is number one and probably always will be. Taking part of the European domestic travel season represents a juicy financial opportunity, potentially unlocking valuable revenue to help weather the storm of a newly restrictive regulatory environment and bring the teams closer to the millions of football fans who live outside Europe.

Cup competitions are already held away from home: the Italian and Spanish football federations, for example, sold hosting rights to their second division cups in Saudi Arabia, and the best clubs make regular pre-season tours of America and Asia. In theory, it's just a small step between that and moving league matches abroad: Barcelona attempted to host a La Liga match against Girona in Miami in 2018. which gave rise to the relevant lawsuit. These could take place anywhere, but the Gulf and the United States seem the most likely destinations.

Hosting the 39th match in the United States has long been a Premier League fever dream. The idea emerged and was abandoned in the 2000s, generating such a fierce reaction that the project now has its own Wikipedia page. More recently, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has He suggested your state – now confirmed as headquarters for the 2026 World Cup final, as the ideal setting for an overseas extension of the English top-flight season. As anyone who has seen the hordes of Premheads asking for a few words of appreciation from (check notes) Joleon Lescott in the context of the recent NBC Premier League fan fest in Nashville can attest, even the crumbs of contact with the The flesh and blood of European club soccer is enough to send the average American soccer fan into paroxysms of delight. Imagine the scenes once these fans get the chance to see Nicolas Jackson and Noni Madueke. fight for the penalty spot in a real league game with points on the table. Riots, mass fainting, Cole Palmer stepping up to convert the penalty: anything is possible.

Once the North London derby has successfully taken hold in northern New Jersey, who's to say where professional soccer's quest for cash may lead? 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, aging European clubs are relatively inexperienced at extracting value from off-field events. Once all those competition draws, transfer windows and points deductions become monetizable units for the overseas fan base, we could be just a few years away from the Premier League's independent commissions issuing their financial decisions from the Madison Square Garden, “Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino Presents Progressive Insurance Winter Transfer Deadline Day!”, or a special PGMOL fixture on Jeddah Corniche (tickets required, respect for VAR optional).

Traditionalists will be horrified by these suggestions, and rightly so. Football, perhaps more than any other sport, has a powerful sense of belonging, from which its traditions and rituals are inseparable. manchester united The game against Liverpool at Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field may be a good deal, but it's not really the same game; It is football, but defanged and kitsch, devoid of the stakes that remain vital to the enduring cultural power of the sport. It's football, but it's not really England anymore; it is the global English Premier League, a fungible asset and floating signifier that can be extracted from its homeland and plugged into any climate for any purpose and at any time. It is sport, in other words, emerged from nowhere.

This is the story usually told in opposition to “Game 39” and similar schemes to send domestic leagues to a week abroad: that the dismemberment of these competitions into independent, export-grade packages violates heritage and disrespects the local fan base. But, in my opinion, organizing a match day in the suburbs of Texas or Miami would also not do football fans abroad any favors.

It is important to emphasize that these events would be stupidly popular. After years of subsisting on the weak sauce of pre-season tours and B-list exhibition matches, most fans outside of Europe would naturally be delighted by the opportunity to watch a legitimate league match live. But erasing the distance that separates the “foreign” fan from the real fan – the live match, the stadium experience, the packed rows cooing in the stands – would also destroy, I think, the romance of watching football abroad. The beauty of enjoying these matches from afar lies precisely in the distance that the spectator maintains from the action: in the notion of Europe and European football that non-European fans construct for themselves. Fan culture in the world beyond a club's traditional turf has a texture of its own, and is no less beautiful or valid for its mutation of the norms established at the base.

If I don't watch it at home, I watch most of the European soccer live in a bar in Brooklyn. The group identities of the fans who gather there bear a certain resemblance to those of their native counterparts, but there are also important divergences; a Manchester United fan in the outer boroughs of New York is never exactly the same as a Manchester United fan in Manchester (or, honk, in London, for that matter). Each of the fan groups at my Brooklyn bar has its own strange charisma. He Chelsea Fanatics: A mix of high school history teachers, drug dealers, and statistics bores who are scarily available for any game on the schedule. Spurs fans: part-time DJs and aspiring leaders with strong opinions on breakfast tacos. Arsenal fans are often too tired to watch their team; On rare occasions, you'll see one or two slumped at the bar, complaining about Emile Smith Rowe's lack of minutes, raising a paternal “Arsenal, Arsenal” every time Martin Ødegaard throws a dart. inside. Manchester City's only known fan has a habit of shouting “ROBOT” every time Erling Haaland scores. Whether it's New York, Nebraska, Kentucky or Kuala Lumpur, fan culture abroad is as sensitive to the whims of place as fan culture is in the “home” city.

The moment the Premier League becomes live American entertainment on par with any other, it will inevitably lose some of its distant luster: it will be just another thing on the buffet. And fans who tune in to the games in English every week on American television will also be stripped of some of its strange charm.

The cultural damage will also spread in the other direction, of course, as the Atlanticist foamers who run the Premier League compete to breathe life into the product with a generous injection of American Cringe. Live renditions of the US and UK national anthems before every match, half-time shows with increasingly desperate talent pools, mascots and marching bands – make no mistake, once the top flight English arrives in the United States, all this and more awaits us. . The Premier League isn't so culturally safe that it doesn't go full Pat McAfee upon seeing Rockaway Beach for the first time. And this is before we even get to the Instagram content: Haaland nibbling on a smoked prime rib next to a legendary pitmaster from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Palmer on the Hollywood Walk of Fame giving a pale thumbs-up under the California sun. , Bruno Fernandes walking along the Jersey shore. It hasn't started yet and I already want it to end.

A 39th round of the Premier League in the United States would degrade everything about it: the teams that travel here, the home fans, the competition itself. A league that has already lost a good part of its soul would move one step closer to spiritual oblivion. There is one thing that European football (intimate, atavistic, elegant and proud) is not made to survive, and that is the 90-minute trip and several sections from midtown Manhattan to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

If the Premier League has any sense, it will resist the idiotic urge to extend its season abroad. Some things just don't go together. You can't force a beaver to have sex with a giraffe. (Well, you probably can, but you shouldn't.) Nor should you make the best clubs in Europe “work” for a live audience in the United States, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. Those clubs, and the sagas of athletic audacity and desperation they produce weekly, already work for millions of soccer fans beyond Europe's borders. European football needs no more Americanization than American football fans. There is no need to mash everything up and make it digestible for the American consumer. The United States, if only occasionally, is able to keep its distance, to appreciate beauty from afar.