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Why European football matches might finally be coming to the U.S.
Adam CraftonApr 16, 2024
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Follow live coverage of Manchester City vs Real Madrid and Bayern Munich vs Arsenal in the Champions League today
In the final week of February, the University of South Carolina announced that its 77,559-capacity Williams-Brice Stadium had secured a friendly match between Premier League rivals Manchester United and Liverpool.
The match, which will take place on August 3, sold out within three hours. The outlay, including fees, started in the low three-figures but under “dynamic pricing”, supporters reported how prices shot up as the supply reduced. The Charleston newspaper The Post and Courier described tickets being snapped up at “Taylor Swift-ness”. Another regional publication said the pace of ticket sales outshone concerts for Beyonce and Jay-Z at the same stadium in 2018.
This is now becoming an annual story in North America. Last summer, Manchester United and Arsenal sold out MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. It was the highest-grossing friendly on record for either team, in any territory, while also becoming the highest-grossing club soccer match at MetLife since the stadium opened in 2010. This summer, the same venue will host the Spanish Clasico between Real Madrid and Barcelona. When The Athletic searched StubHub this weekend for available tickets, the “best price” quoted was $846 (£680) for a seat.
This, therefore, is frighteningly big business for leading European teams and this, we should remember, is for games that offer zero jeopardy and often throw up under-par selections, as coaches rotate heavily in pre-season. Yet what if there were to be a world where the games that truly mattered, involving Europe’s most famous teams, did land in North America?
After the events of the past week, this scenario is now more realistic than ever before. On April 8, a resolution filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan revealed the New York City-based event promoter Relevent Sports would drop FIFA as a defendant in its antitrust lawsuit against FIFA and the U.S. Soccer Federation. Without getting too wrapped up in the legalese, the thrust of the matter is as follows:
Relevent Sports is a promoter, founded by the billionaire Stephen Ross, who is also the owner of NFL team Miami Dolphins. Relevent has developed close ties with many of Europe’s foremost clubs, as for over a decade it has organised exhibition matches in the United States, while it has also been trusted by UEFA, the organiser of the Champions League and Europa League, to sell its media rights in North America.
In 2022, Relevent helped secure a 2.5x uplift on the previous deal when Paramount Global agreed a six-year package worth $1.5billion to broadcast UEFA competitions. In 2018, Relevent agreed a 15-year deal with Spain’s La Liga, and since secured an eight-year, $1.4billion deal with ESPN for La Liga matches, swiftly followed by $600million from television rights in Mexico and Central America. In the context of this story, therefore, it is important to keep in mind that Relevent are not nascent start-up disruptors, but a firmly established operation with their tentacles already encircling European football.
Relevent became a concern for FIFA, and by extension U.S. Soccer when, in 2018, the promoter sought to bring a La Liga fixture between Barcelona and Girona to Miami. Later that year, the FIFA Council issued a directive blocking the idea, saying that official domestic games must be staged in the league’s home territory.
In the following year, Relevent then sought to play an Ecuadorean domestic fixture in Miami, only for U.S. Soccer, whose approval would be needed as the federation of the territory where the game was proposed, to deny the application and cite the previous FIFA directive. Since then, Relevent has been engaged in a five-year legal battle against both FIFA and U.S. Soccer, arguing that the parties have conspired to prevent Relevent from hosting regular-season matches involving foreign clubs in the U.S., thus violating U.S. antitrust law designed to prevent unjust collusion or monopolies.
It had become background noise, until last Monday when FIFA were dropped from the lawsuit and the two parties announced a settlement, although details of it were not disclosed. Relevent CEO Danny Sillman, however, provided a clue, saying FIFA will “consider changes to its existing rules about whether games can be played outside of a league’s home territory”. In a matter such as this, it is difficult to imagine what a settlement could actually be; there is not exactly a half-way house because either games will either be permitted or not be permitted. Crucially, the matter was dismissed without prejudice, meaning Relevent can re-open the case at any time, while U.S. Soccer remain a defendant in the case that may be heard in the Supreme Court later this year.
Over the past week, The Athletic has made plenty of phone calls on this subject, to promoters, governing bodies, federations, domestic leagues and club executives. It is striking how, at this moment, next to nobody is prepared to put their name to quotes on the matter. For Relevent, FIFA and U.S. Soccer, that is because the sensitivity of the legal matters is too high. For governing bodies, leagues and club executives, it is perceived as the thorniest of politics. Under the veil of anonymity, however, clues to football’s future emerge.
One official familiar with the process says: “Literally everything is on the table right now and the the soccer world in five years could resemble a version of what it looks right now, or it could look radically different, and neither would surprise me.”
With more and more NFL games taking place outwith the USA, potentially the same could soon be happening with some of europes biggest matches
