This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 24, 2018 - December 30, 2018
Watching Liverpool vs Manchester United on TV five days after a packed national stadium reverberated to Malaysia vs Vietnam, it was not a huge leap of the imagination to picture Jürgen Klopp and José Mourinho (editor’s note: Sacked by United after that defeat against Liverpool) leading out their teams in Bukit Jalil.
They would get an even bigger crowd — Liverpool had 60,000 to watch them train a few years ago and that is more than Anfield’s capacity. The vast majority of fans here support either one or the other of the English giants, so there would be a pretty good atmosphere too.
But is the impossible dream just a dream? It flickered ever so briefly when the English Premier League proposed an overseas round of matches a decade ago, before it was strangled at birth. But the idea of playing proper fixtures beyond a country’s borders lives on, although this month highlighted just how divisive an issue it remains.
After attending South America’s club championship final second leg, which had been hastily moved to Madrid, European football boss Aleksander Ceferin did not rule out a similar continental shift for Europe’s equivalent. The UEFA president declared: “It is a global sport and the Champions League is the biggest football competition in the world. One billion people watch the Champions League final. That is a serious number and I think now more than 50% of those are outside Europe. Organising a match somewhere else? It is hard to say no now.”
Just 48 hours later Barcelona said “no” to playing a La Liga match against Girona in Miami next month. The Madrid match had come about because of last-minute safety concerns whereas the game in the US had been planned for months. It was part of a carefully calibrated expansion programme by Spain’s national league.
But if the circumstances were very different, the burning issue they raised was fundamentally the same — the hot potato of depriving traditional fans of football to entice new ones and make more money elsewhere.
Globalisation may seem an unstoppable force but it can be a double-edged sword, especially in the globe’s most popular sport. Moving a match to another continent may bring a wider audience, grow the game and boost the coffers of the eager hosts. But it can distort the fairness of competition, dilute the spectacle and disillusion the faithful.
Also, to globalise can be to sanitise, and if that means a loss of flavour and passion, it becomes just another franchise circus like the American National Football League and the National Basketball Association, which have very different operating systems and ethos, and are far less tribal.
Unprecedented violence had forced repeated postponements of the Copa Libertadores second leg between two Buenos Aires neighbours, River Plate and Boca Juniors, so Real Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium was chosen as a safe haven.
Just 4,000 fans of each club travelled due to the cost, and though some 62,000 created an atmosphere, it was a heavily diluted version of the real thing. With fanatical fans of both sides, a Boca-River game is the fiercest football derby and one of sport’s great occasions.
It was No 1 on a list of “50 sporting things to do before you die” in the UK’s Observer newspaper and high on the bucket list of Sir Alex Ferguson, no less. But those fans who did travel complained the Madrid edition was at best “a pale shadow”, at worst “an embarrassment”.
Barcelona also sensed they were going to be left red-faced as a court prepared to rule on La Liga’s right to take away a domestic Spanish fixture and play it in another country. Most of Spanish football agreed with Real Madrid’s contention it was “fundamental” that teams play “home and away at each other’s stadium” for “the integrity and equality” of La Liga. Barca withdrew, they said, “after seeing the lack of consensus surrounding the proposal”.
Undaunted, the league said they would persevere with their long-term strategy of taking games out of Spain. The staging of the Spanish Super Cup in Morocco was a case of dipping a toe in foreign waters since when they signed a 15-year deal with US company Relevent to play one game a year in the US.
It is far more modest than the infamous 39th game that the EPL came up with in 2010. Back then, all 20 teams were meant to play an extra fixture (beyond the normal 38) and thus would not have been depriving the domestic fans of any football.
EPL head honcho Richard Scudamore, who retires at the end of the season, says he had “a cupboard full of models as to how it could and could not work”, when he first announced it. Likely venues suggested were Australia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Gulf and North America. All are wealthy regions where interest in English football is strong relative to the level of the domestic game. And venues would have had warm, predictable weather, unlike England in January.
Not least of Scudamore’s problems was that all those places would have wanted the plum fixture — Liverpool and Manchester United — with games such as Burnley vs Huddersfield unable to sell out in their home towns, let alone in Sydney or Dubai. And even Malaysia, where we like to think we have a bigger appetite for EPL than most places, may not have seen a full house for a clash outside the Big Six.
Asked whether Malaysia would allow a foreign league to play such a game here, FAM general-secretary Stuart Ramalingam offered a guarded welcome. He said: “I would support it if it does not affect the commercial value of our own local league. If it helps grow the commercial industry around football and if it does help drive interest and attention, why not? But if it cannibalises the already small space, then I would rather keep that for local football.”
The question is: was the extraordinary spectacle of a Copa Libertadores final in Europe a genuine one-off or the thin end of the wedge as football’s suits seek to exploit the game’s global appeal? Or will the English and Spanish clubs’ opposition ensure that domestic football is kept within its borders?
Bob Holmes is a longtime sports writer specialising in football
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