The game, it seems, has not quite gone. Well, the Villarreal vs Barcelona game in December will not be going to Miami anyway. That much is clear, at least.

On Tuesday evening, La Liga announced with “deep regret” that Villarreal will be forced to host Barcelona at their own stadium, rather than 4,500 miles away in Florida. And what an extraordinary sentence that is.

The league’s president, Javier Tebas, reacted angrily, lamenting “a missed opportunity” for Spanish football and blaming small-minded, provincial types for the protests and obstacles that had left them with “insufficient time” to finalise arrangements to take the game to Miami.

“We will keep trying,” Tebas posted on his X account. Let nobody doubt that. And Italy’s Serie A is still pushing for approval to move Milan’s match against Como to Perth, Australia, in February. The momentum behind these ventures — the idea, unpalatable to many of us small-minded, provincial types, of taking domestic league matches abroad — remains strong. Resistance, other than a short but effective protest from La Liga players last weekend, has been pretty weak.

Why unpalatable? Because tradition — dating back to 1929 in the cases of the Italian and Spanish leagues and back to 1888 in England — matters. Because the integrity of league competitions, built around the simple principle of teams playing each other at home and away, matters. Because clubs exist primarily to represent their local community. Because taking league matches to America, Australia, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else would be an act of aggression. And because the moment you do that, football changes dramatically and perhaps irretrievably. Proper “Game’s gone” territory.

Villarreal and Barcelona will not play in Miami (Manaure Qunitero/Getty Images)

“We understand and respect the concerns this decision may raise,” Tebas told ESPN a couple of weeks ago. “But it is important to put it in context. This is one game out of 380 that make up the season.”

But it wouldn’t just be one game, would it? It would be one game at first, but then it would grow and grow and then every league competition would be at it, sending more and more games abroad. Before you knew it, there would be high-profile European league matches taking place in the United States, Australia and across Asia as often as not.

“Who have your lot got this weekend?”

“Aston Villa away.”

“Tough place to go, Villa Park.”

“Yeah, but this game’s in Sydney.”

The obvious riposte at this point is that the NFL has been doing it for years. It has just passed the 20th anniversary of its first game abroad, which saw the Arizona Cardinals play the San Francisco 49ers in front of a crowd of 103,467 in Mexico City. Seven of this season’s NFL games this season have been moved overseas — three to London, one to Dublin, one to Berlin, one to Madrid and one to Sao Paulo — and the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, has suggested that number could increase to 16 in years to come. The venture has been popular and successful, albeit considerably less so among many of the players.

But the NFL operates in its own ecosystem, largely devoid of competition and wider concerns. It has a different format — more malleable, let’s say — different financial and ownership models and a different relationship with geography and history. If an owner wants to move a franchise to another city, or indeed to another state, it is not beyond the realms of possibility. Taking NFL games across the Atlantic is not to every fan’s taste, but the entire culture around the sport is so unapologetically business-oriented that its “international series” is at very least tolerated and in some cases welcomed.

By contrast, domestic football leagues exist as part of a much wider ecosystem, which is already dominated to an unhealthy degree by a handful of clubs in a handful of European leagues, most obviously the Premier League but also including La Liga and Serie A. Taking games to different territories means parking your tanks on another league’s lawn.

Como fans protest against their match against Milan being moved to Perth (Nicolo Campo/Getty Images)

Tebas disputed that in an interview with The Athletic this month. “It’s a mistake to think this cannibalises the (American) national league,” he said. “It doesn’t cannibalise anything. If MLS, Liga MX or the Ecuadorian league came to play in Spain, that wouldn’t compete with La Liga. It would create more fans, more interest. It’s a synergy.”

But it isn’t and it wouldn’t. There is no mutual trade-off here, there is no synergy whatsoever. If MLS held games in Spain, it wouldn’t even cause a ripple. And one of the dangers here is that, if big European club games are to be held in the United States, Australia, Japan or anywhere else over the coming years, then it will become even harder for Major League Soccer, A-League and J1 League to win and retain hearts and minds on their own doorstep.

MLS has been conspicuous by its silence lately on the question of La Liga matches in Miami — just as it was in the summer when FIFA rolled into the U.S. for its Club World Cup tournament, which was scheduled with little or no regard for the domestic league campaign that was already in full swing. But MLS commissioner Don Garber was right when he told the Daily Mail last October, on this very issue, that football and its infrastructure should be “based around borders”; if it is not, the whole thing is in danger of falling down.

Garber said something similar after the Premier League announced in 2008 that it planned to introduce an “international round”, with 10 fixtures played in 10 different cities around the world on a single weekend. The backlash against the so-called “39th game” was so huge and so widespread — not least by football authorities in those territories such as the U.S., Australia and Japan that had been identified as likely venues — that the Premier League, humiliated, quietly dropped the idea.

Richard Scudamore, the league’s chief executive at the time of the “39th game” debacle, told reporters in 2010 that, after negotiating an enormous new global broadcast rights deal, there was no longer any “economic need” to do it. 

But it has never truly gone away. At various points since then, one club executive or another has let slip, usually privately, that there is still latent support for the idea among Premier League clubs — and that should not surprise anyone, given that so many of those clubs are in hock to owners for whom financial considerations trump the game’s interests time and time again.

The Premier League’s ’39th Game’ plan was met by widespread fan protest (Tony Marshall/Getty Images)

It is in part because of a struggle to keep pace with the Premier League’s financial growth that La Liga and Serie A have pursued the idea of moving games abroad — initially through their Super Cup competitions and now league matches. The most recent edition of Deloitte’s Football Money League, ranking clubs by revenue for the 2023-24 season, was led by Real Madrid, but Barcelona (sixth) and Atletico Madrid (12th) were the only other Spanish clubs in the top 30. The richest Italian club was Milan (13th). By contrast, there were six English clubs in the top 10 and there were 14 in the top 30 — and that figure will only grow as the Premier League’s success story continues.

Tebas calls it “essential” that La Liga is allowed to take games abroad. But truly, has it ever been less so? The biggest, richest, most powerful clubs — the ones that will inevitably be the main beneficiaries if this takes hold — are making far more money than ever before. Barcelona announced this month that their revenue for the 2024-25 season reached €994million (£864m; $1.15bn), fuelled by record-breaking commercial income, and that they expect that figure to reach €1.1billion this season, pending their planned return to the redeveloped Camp Nou.

One of Tebas’ social media posts on Wednesday struck an interesting tone. “It’s curious to see so much enthusiasm for blocking a single match abroad while the majority of national leagues across Europe struggle to survive,” he said. “The true way to protect football’s traditions is to defend competitive balance at home — not to fear its global projection.”

The point about competitive balance is a welcome one. But it is also bemusing to suggest that a desire for competitive balance — of which La Liga is hardly a bastion — might be best served by taking games overseas.

These are not the words of a Premier League cheerleader, or indeed of someone fearful that English football will be left behind if La Liga and Serie A get their way. Some of Tebas’ criticisms of the Premier League — about the dangers of state ownership of clubs, about a financial model that encourages clubs to run up huge losses, about the ineffectiveness of its attempts at financial regulation, about the damaging consequences of one league being so much richer than its competitors — meet with approval from this quarter.

The way European football’s financial landscape has been transformed over the last couple of decades — putting Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and a handful of English clubs far beyond everyone else, including the Italian giants — is enormously unhealthy. 

But anyone imagining that this problem will be resolved by taking games beyond international borders is extremely naive. What do La Liga and Serie A think will happen if they take games abroad? Do the people in charge of Villarreal and Como think playing games in Miami and Perth would be transformative for their clubs? The games would sell out, there would be a commercial upside, but what it would do — particularly if Real Madrid were to overcome their peculiar but welcome opposition to the idea — is make the rich clubs richer in a league whose revenue distribution model makes the Premier League, by comparison, look like a model of egalitarian virtue.

Villarreal vs Barcelona had been set to be played at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium (Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)

And then, with wearying inevitability, the Premier League would follow suit. Of course they would. And La Liga would find that, beyond the huge appeal of Real Madrid and Barcelona and a rivalry that is unsurpassed in world football, their offering to a global audience would be nothing like as wide as that of the Premier League, which has been marketed so much more successfully — even in a period when, particularly when Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were in residence, La Liga could boast a far better on-pitch product.

There is certainly one moral argument for taking games overseas, for saying that fans who follow their team from all corners of the world deserve to have their game and their heroes brought to them. When Tebas tried to take Barcelona’s game against Girona to Miami in 2019, he said, “Fans from all over the world deserve to be able to enjoy the leagues they love wherever they are” — the same sentiments Scudamore expressed in 2008.

So… Miami, huh? Nothing against the place, but there cannot be many cities, outside of Europe, where the local football community has been so well served in recent years. The Club World Cup this summer saw matches at the Hard Rock Stadium involving Real Madrid (twice), Bayern Munich, Boca Juniors, Juventus, Benfica, Palmeiras, Flamengo and Fluminense, as well as Inter Miami (twice). In 2024, it hosted three big matches at Copa America, including the final between Argentina and Colombia. Throughout this time, Barcelona old boys Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba, Luis Suarez and Lionel Messi have been doing regular turns for Inter Miami just up the coast in Fort Lauderdale.

It’s always the same venues when European clubs hit the road: the U.S., the Middle East, certain cities in the Far East and Australia… the commercial contracts add up. This season’s Supercopa de Espana will, like five of the previous six, be held in Saudi Arabia — another destination not exactly starved of the sight of world-class sports these days.

If it were about taking games to football-mad audiences in Mumbai, Islamabad, Lagos, Nairobi or Johannesburg, it would be possible to believe that, as Tebas said in that interview with The Athletic, “this is not about money”. But no, for all the talk of taking their game to all four corners of the world, football’s expansionists and modern-day conquistadores seem to have a strangely narrow worldview.

Ultimately, though, there has to be some recognition that this constant, commercially driven demand for more — more competitions, bigger competitions, more games, one big all-singing, all-dancing football roadshow coming soon to a city near you, and to hell with the demands on the players and the carbon footprint — is a madness. Seriously, where does all of this end?

Tebas has made clear that he and La Liga will not give up. That Como-Milan game is still, for now, due to take place in Perth even if, as Football Supporters Europe said in a powerful statement on Wednesday, “The game has no place 15,000 kilometres away from its home”.

UEFA, European football’s governing body, has stated its opposition to the plan but has also said that FIFA’s regulatory framework is “not clear and detailed enough” for it to be able to block it.

Slowly but surely, the legal obstacles to taking games overseas have been removed over the past few years. But listening to Tebas and his Serie A counterparts, contemplating the damage that could be done to the football landscape if this happens, their hell-bent determination to get their way calls to mind that wonderful line in Jurassic Park, the one about being so preoccupied with finding out whether they could do something that they totally lost track of whether they should.