Can Premier League win over fans for a Stateside adventure? | OneFootball

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Sadiq Khan pushing for re-election after promising to bring the Super Bowl to London; the Football Supporters' Association promising a "full-blown, two feet off the ground, studs to the knee tackle" should a single Premier League match head the other way.

The Transatlantic Sporting Highway is not, in present form, a two-way street, or at least certainly not one in which Mustangs and Minis drive in opposite directions at equal speed. Since 2008, the NFL has been bringing regular matches across the water with huge success, while the NBA has come, seen and moved on to Paris, leaving space for Major League Baseball, back for its third London Series next month.

In return, the Premier League has gone as far as a summer series of friendlies in the States, effectively an ITV2 spin-off of the real thing. The prospect of something more substantial, however, is back on the agenda after a senior executive at NBC told The Athletic that the US broadcaster — which holds the Premier League's most lucrative TV deal outside the UK, worth £2 billion over six years — will "continue to push" for matches to be played in the States.

We have been here before, back in 2008, when the Premier League tabled plans for a so-called "39th game". The idea, to tag an international round onto the existing 38-game season, went down in flames, shot at by fan groups, proposed host countries, Fifa and Sir Alex Ferguson.

Almost half of American soccer fans would name an English side first if asked who they support

Supporter opposition remains the heftiest obstacle to expansion, as the European Super League saga showed, but the landscape has changed since overseas matches were first floated.

The Premier League's appeal in America has continued to grow, to the point where, according to Nielsen Media Research, almost half of US soccer fans would name an English side first if asked who they support. American influence within the Premier League has reached an historic high: depending on promotion and relegation, around half and possibly even a dozen of the clubs in the top flight next season will be US-owned. Considering the league is run by its clubs, and "only" a 14-vote majority is required to pass major changes, that is a powerful block.

Fifa's stance has also softened, with Spain's LaLiga now pledging to go Stateside as early as 2025-26, and while insisting there are no plans for the Premier League to do likewise quite yet, chief executive Richard Masters admitted last week that "the door looks ajar".

To virtually all sports without a natural presence in it, cracking the American market is the holy grail. There is a reason cricket is taking part of its T20 World Cup to the US this summer and plonking its showpiece fixture — India vs Pakistan — in New York.

The Premier League, though, is a rarity in that it has already succeeded in breaking America from afar. There are concerns about sustainability, workloads, logistics and so much more, but the economic opportunity means it is inevitable that at some point it will seek to take advantage.

Arsenal fans in California

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What would an international game look like? Taking the Community Shield abroad has been touted before and several major European nations have already staged their equivalents in the Middle East. As a gateway, it could work: there would be no mid-season travel and at least one, if not two, of the most recognisable clubs would always take part, a more attractive spectacle to the target market, presumably, than a regular season game between Burnley and Bournemouth. But with the fixture already thought of in some quarters as a glorified friendly, it is unlikely to sate a US audience.

A blanket 39th game across the league, though, is surely a non-starter. The NFL has expanded from 16 matches to 17, partly to add scope for more international games, but that is a competition not built on the equal principle of meeting each team home and away. You could not, for instance, have one club playing Sheffield United three times and another Man City.

More likely is that any expansion would initially start with one or two select fixtures being played in the States. There would have to be some financial incentive for teams to give up a money-making home fixture, but that should be no issue, since unlocking the riches of the US market is really what this whole venture is about. Tottenham know this best of all, seeing as their stadium was partly built to host the NFL's London stays.

Persuading teams to sacrifice the competitive advantage of playing their own ground, however, might be more of an ask, and convincing them that the backlash from supporters would be worth it, even more so.

And so, we are back on a familiar battleground, one on which, occasionally, fans have won famous triumphs, but more often, money talks. If it does this time, it will be with an American drawl.