Colin Cowherd peered down from his studio desk perched high above the chairs assigned to the guests on his Fox Sports talkshow. He had a simple question for Fifa president Gianni Infantino. More of a demand, really.
“Give me something about America that you really love,” Cowherd said.
“Can I say burger?” Infantino offered, before laughing a little too hard. “I would say burger, definitely, but what I think as well, and this is not to flatter anyone, but this is really the land of opportunity. There are so many opportunities here for so many people. Which is why I still don’t understand why soccer has not become the No 1 [sport] here.”
Burgers, sure. And opportunity, yes, that too. But Infantino’s answer elided the load-bearing pillar of his deep commitment to the American market: its economic might (for now).
By this point in his interview with Cowherd, Infantino had already uttered his usual vaporings about the grandeur of his steroidal Club World Cup. This was his latest stop in a media blitz to drum up even the slightest glimmer of interest in the tournament, as the scent of desperation grows pungent. He had also confessed that Fifa “basically doubles the revenues” by holding its signature tournaments stateside.
At the same time, Infantino argued that a lack of investment is holding American soccer back. “They should listen to me, and then they’ll become the No 1 league in the world,” he said, apparently referring to Major League Soccer.
And contained therein we find the tension between the growth of American domestic soccer on the one hand, and Americans’ mushrooming interest in the sport as a whole on the other.
Long gone are the years when MLS felt like it was teetering on the brink of insolvency, its future forever tenuous. Yet some teams, usually ones owned by those who have been around the league the longest, still keep costs down wherever they can. The newer investors, by and large, are keen to spend more freely and dump cash into the gap separating the league from the more lavish circuits it could realistically catch up with. This internal disagreement has been a source of friction for years and will come to a head at some point. It is fair to say, then, that MLS could and probably should spend more.
But it is also true that the rest of football has treated the American market as a giant ATM. For the next few years, Infantino’s Fifa is at the vanguard of this trend.
MLS doesn’t just compete with the world’s other leagues for TV viewers – and the fact that it doesn’t come on the air until hours after most European games have already finished doesn’t help any – but it’s now the only league anywhere that also has to contend with a match-going alternative. The very reason the Club World Cup was planned here, and that the World Cup proper will be here, as Infantino openly admits, is to reach into the pockets of the American consumer. That’s why Europe’s most marketable clubs go on extensive pre-season tours here. It’s why the Mexican national team plays many of its matches here. It’s why Conmebol has held two editions of Copa América here in the span of just eight years.
It’s why an American promoter, Relevent Sports, sued Fifa and US Soccer on antitrust grounds, fighting a policy that contained domestic league games to the borders of the nation in question. Relevent accomplished exactly what it aimed to when Fifa agreed to scrap the policy in order to be dismissed from the suit. Before long, Spain’s La Liga, or Italy’s Serie A, or any number of other leagues could attempt to put on their matches nearby your local MLS team.
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Soon, MLS will no longer just be up against pre-season friendlies or the Club World Cup – or for that matter, the behemoths of the NBA and NFL – but also competitive games in leagues the US public already knows well. Name another domestic league that has to fret about some other competition setting up shop in its backyard. Would Barcelona and Atlético Madrid attempt to play a potentially title-swaying tilt in Germany or Argentina or Pakistan, as they tried to in Miami in December? It’s doubtful.
MLS has Infantino to thank for that, on whose watch whatever protections existed for the league have vanished. The primary issue isn’t that MLS is underfunded. It’s that it faces murderous competition for fans.
The American market is spending huge amounts of money on live soccer. A lot of it just isn’t going to MLS. That expenditure doesn’t come from a bottomless pit of wealth, although Fifa remains intent on finding out just where the floor is with towering ticket prices to the upcoming summer bonanzas. At some point, soccer fans will be tapped out on what they’re willing to spend to watch live games.
If you want domestic American soccer to develop, you have to institute a kind of soccer protectionism – although that may presently not land so well. Or to do something, anything, to ensure that a growing league doesn’t spend its entire season fighting off all the interlopers keen on its market, arriving routinely to pick off the interest and ransack the audience’s disposable income.
But then Fifa is no longer in the business of opening up new markets, as it once was. Rather, it is fully focused on monetizing the sport, no matter the collateral damage.
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