Uefa allowing domestic games abroad is a sad turning point, ending soccer as we’ve known it

Looking back someday, it may be hard to identify the exact moment when soccer altogether lost the silhouette that had loosely contained its shape for a century. When its governing bodies let go at last, handing the reins to the horses. When the last line holding against the sport’s self-immolating avarice collapsed and all were free to just do whatever they want. When crotchety pundits were finally right and the game was fully gone.

Or maybe we’ll know precisely when it was: 6 October 2025, when the Uefa executive committee declared in an extraordinary release that it was opposed to domestic league matches being played abroad – while allowing two of them “on an exceptional basis.” Barcelona and Villarreal will stage an ostensibly domestic La Liga game in Miami in December. Milan and Como are to play a Serie A match in Perth, Australia – a mere 20-hour flight from Italy – in February.

In their statement, Uefa took pains not just to express its opposition to the measure, but also to lay the blame for it at the foot of Fifa, whose rules it said were “not clear and detailed enough” to merit a rejection. Uefa said it wants to work with Fifa to create new rules to curb league games played abroad – presumably in a way that will not run afoul of Relevent Sports, the sports promotion company whose antitrust suit got Fifa to drop its statutes. Relevent dropped Fifa from the suit without prejudice, meaning it can be reopened at any time if things aren’t to the promotion company’s satisfaction.

“While it is regrettable to have to let these two games go ahead, this decision is exceptional and shall not be seen as setting a precedent,” Uefa president Aleksander Čeferin said. It’s hard to see how that can be true. This is not how precedents work.

The floodgates are open. The toothpaste has been squeezed from the tube. The foundation upon which professional soccer is built, structured primarily as a series of domestic circuits, is cracked. Any game can now theoretically be played anywhere, wherever the highest bidder happens to be. Once the Spanish league – or any league – is no longer a thing that can only be played on home soil, there is no going back.

We have been on a long, unrelenting march to this place for decades. And the forces that carried the sport there were powered at least partially by American money and methods. We have to be frank about that.

The La Liga president, Javier Tebas, spent more than seven years working to put a Barça league game in Miami in an effort to keep up with the Premier League – a cash-churning colossus created through the American model of sporting monetization. He and others have done this because all of soccer sees the United States as an ATM with no pin number, luring one competition after another. In this effort, Tebas was abetted by Relevent, an American promoter.

Clubs will now be free to chase after revenue anywhere they can find it. People may try to get in their way on account of the sport’s – or the players’ or the fans’ – best interests, but they stand little chance of actually stopping anything with so much money at stake.

Villarreal will play 18 home games this season, to every other La Liga team’s 19. Their fans will get one fewer match in their city, although they will be compensated with offers of free flights to Miami. Barça and Villarreal players – not to mention those of Milan and Como – will have travelled substantially more for their domestic competition than their rivals have this season. The impact of this in-season barnstorming on title races, relegation and promotion is inevitable.

A great many people were clear-eyed about the ramifications downstream. Real Madrid – co-instigators of the failed European Super League, authors of the sport’s Galacticos era that kickstarted the financial arms race – sounded like the improbable voice of reason here.

“The integrity of the competition requires that all matches be held under the same conditions for all teams,” the Spanish club wrote in a statement. “Unilaterally modifying this regime breaks the equality between contenders, compromises the legitimacy of the results and sets an unacceptable precedent that opens the door to exceptions based on interests other than strictly sporting. If this proposal is carried out, its consequences would be so serious that they would mean a before and after for the world of football.”

The Spanish Professional Footballers’ Association was opposed as well. As was the Football Supporters Europe group. So has Čeferin been, who before Monday’s announcement said in an interview: “Football should be played in Europe, and fans should be able to watch it at home. They cannot travel to Australia or the United States to see their teams.”

The European Union’s commissioner for sport, Glenn Micallef, in his own lament, argued that “strong, community-based clubs are the heart of the European sport model. Moving competitions abroad isn’t innovation, it’s betrayal”.

Ah well, nevertheless. Ultimately, Uefa did not make this decision alone. The leagues made it. Fifa made it by agreeing to change its policies when it was dismissed from the Relevent lawsuit. Soccer’s professional ranks made it a long time ago, when they started playing domestic super cup competitions far afield, in China and in the Gulf and the United States.

Whoever you want to blame, European soccer has now become fully Americanized, opting for unfettered capitalism, bound by no border or tradition. And now, officially, something essential is lost.

Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out in the spring of 2026. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.

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