(by Marco Casalone) – The Major League Baseball (MLB, the American professional league of baseball) recently announced plans to play a regular season game in Europe in the 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 seasons; the cities where the matches will be held will be London and, in all likelihood, Paris.
It will be a return for the MLB in the capital of United Kingdom: in 2019, in fact, the London Olympic Stadium hosted two matches between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, the first played by the US league in the Old Continent; in 2020, however, the meeting between the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals could not take place due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“London did an incredible job when they hosted us three years ago and both the players and their union were extremely happy to accept a return to England,” Major League commissioner Rob Manfred said in an interview. granted to Sports Business Journal, “Our intent remains to increase the popularity of our game in Europe and for this reason, in addition to playing some regular season matches in major cities, we will continue to promote events for fans, programs for young people and much more “.
If the matches will take place in London in 2023, 2024 and 2026, the candidate to host the match in 2025 is Paris, a city where another American professional league such as the NBA has already played an official match in 2020 and will return there. in 2023.
Although no official announcement has been released, several rumors report the choice of the Stade de France (80,000-seat facility inaugurated in 1998 and home to the home matches of the French national football and rugby teams) as the venue for the event. ; the presence in the French capital of the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise also seems to be confirmed, a team that in the recent past has played official matches away from the United States (in Sidney in Australia and in Monterrey in Mexico).
After not having played any more games outside the States from 2019 due to the restrictions imposed by the Coronavirus, the Major League is therefore ready to leave for a real world tour: in fact, in addition to London and Paris, matches are already scheduled in Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
