FC Barcelona: Limiting excess works (opinion)

On Tuesday evening it was official: The Spanish football league announced that it had canceled the game between FC Barcelona and Villarreal FC in Miami planned for December 20th. La Liga referred to nebulously the organizer, the US sports agency Relevent Sports, which had asked for the game to be “postponed” to an indefinite future.

The agency has with LaLiga a joint venture partnership to market Spanish football in North America. The cancellation or “postponement” was due to the “uncertainty that has arisen in Spain in the last few weeks,” the league said painfully.

The reasoning is bogus nonsense. It is just a clumsy attempt to verbally wriggle out of the fact that the protests against the foreign game among coaches, professionals and supporters were too great. Why this isn’t clearly stated remains La Liga’s secret.

Since it was announced in August that the first championship game in the history of the Spanish league would be planned abroad, there had been a hail of criticism. Fans, players and coaches such as Xabi Alonso from Real Madrid and Hansi Flick, directly affected as coach of FC Barcelona, ​​spoke out against the plan. For different reasons: travel stress, distortion of competition, exclusion of home fans.

Last weekend the protests reached their climax. First the players’ association sided with the critics, then there was no play in every stadium for 15 seconds after kick-off. The live TV broadcast covered the protest with the Exterior view of the stadium. A ridiculous act of censorship that did nothing to lessen the force of the protest.

What remains is the reassuring realization that not every commercial excess can be enforced, even in leagues that are further (or more unscrupulous) in marketing than the Bundesliga. At some point it’s too much. Spanish clubs already host the Supercopa tournament (a bloated four-team Super Cup) in Saudi Arabia in the winter. A sportingly insignificant competition that people like to use to maximize profits. Numerous test matches of major European clubs take place in countries with “interesting markets”. But hosting a league game abroad has obviously overstepped the mark.

Unfortunately, and this is also true, the cancellation of the Miami game is only a temporary victory. The fight for the future of football continues. New marketing ideas will follow. La Liga, like other leagues, will continue to pursue “generating new revenue” and “global expansion of our league,” that much is certain. And don’t forget: Clubs like FC Barcelona support such projects under their president Joan Laporta. The crack runs right through football.