BarcelonaNew script twist with the match that Barça had to play in Miami this December against Villarreal. The League announced this Tuesday that, after discussions with the promoter of the event, it has decided to cancel the match. According to the competition’s statement, the final decision has been made due to the “uncertainty generated in Spain during the last weeks”. The clubs have already been informed and, therefore, the match will be played at the Cerámica stadium on December 20.
The League has made it clear that it was the American promoter Relevent who made this decision. In its statement, the League “deeply regrets that this project, which represented a historic and unparalleled opportunity for the internationalization of Spanish football, cannot go ahead. The holding of an official match outside our borders would have been a decisive step in the global expansion of our competition, strengthening the international presence of the clubs, the positioning of the players and the brand of Spanish football in a strategic market such as the United States”.
The Spanish league had worked hard in recent months to secure permission from UEFA, FIFA and the Spanish Football Federation to take a league game abroad for the first time, after years of failing to do so. This seemed to be good for the president of the League, Javier Tebas, who had met with the rejection of the players, who were making a symbolic protest at the beginning of the matches by refusing to play for a few seconds. FIFA and UEFA had given permission to the Spanish and Italian leagues to take a domestic tournament match abroad this year, a dream that Tebas has been pursuing since 2017. The Como-Milan game in Perth, Australia, is currently going ahead.
The promoter Relevent was in charge of bringing the match to the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. Founded in 2012 by Stephen Ross, a real estate entrepreneur also known for owning the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, this company invests in television rights and organizes the Madrid and Miami tennis tournaments. With the help of Ross, Relevent organizes each summer friendlies of top European clubs in the United States and closes an agreement with UEFA and the League to promote soccer. His challenge was this match, but he has decided to backtrack just a day before the meeting scheduled for this Wednesday between the League and the Footballers’ Association (AFE) to reconcile positions. Also this Tuesday, Real Madrid, the club that has opposed the match the most, had sent a statement to the Superior Sports Council asking that the match not be played abroad. In the preview of the match between Madrid and Juve, the goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois had stated that “this match adulterates the competition and does not follow the agreement of the players”.
The news has surprised the management of Barça who left the Olympic stadium and that of Villarreal in the box office during the match against Manchester City. Fernando Roig Negueroles, president of the yellow team, could not hide his reaction since Villarreal was confident of making a lot of money with this match.
This is the second time the league has been left with a nosebleed. In 2018, when he officially proposed it for the first time, he ran into opposition from the Federation. A case that ended up going to trial five years ago when they wanted to bring the Girona-Barcelona match of the 2018-2019 season to the United States, litigation that was resolved against the employers first in a commercial court in Madrid, then in the Provincial Court and then in the Supreme Court. Now that it looked like the Miami game would be done, the League has seen how the opposition it generates scares the promoters.
