Is taking European games to the U.S. worth the trouble? Serie A wants to set the trend

In a windowless room inside SpaceX’s sprawling facility in Boca Chica, Florida, a dedicated team of staffers spend their time designing what life might look like on Mars. At Elon Musk’s command, they have drawn up plans for where humans might live, what they might eat and how they might dress so as not to die instantly of radiation poisoning on the red planet.

Musk has long considered making humanity “multiplanetary” his life’s work. He appears to be convinced that doing so is vital to the continued survival of civilization and, as he has said, “consciousness.” The world, as far as he is concerned, is over. Humans have to break its bounds if we are to survive.

Those who have worked for him say his ambitions to “occupy Mars,” as often displayed on his T-shirts — Musk is a firm believer that clothes are a great way to express opinions — have driven his vision not just for SpaceX, but for The Boring Company, his tunnelling venture, and even for X, his social media platform.

He has, according to The New York Times, previously confided he bought it not just because he wanted people to laugh at his jokes but because he was trying to “test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus” might work. (Future colonists are advised to examine his real-life record in this area before boarding.) 

Still, the challenges are considerable. It is not just Mars’ hostile environment, with its noxious air and barren terrain, that poses a problem.

There is, for example, the issue of warmth. The median surface temperature on Mars is a brisk -85 degrees Fahrenheit (-65C). Musk’s solution to this, according to an interview he gave in 2022, would be to set off a series of thermonuclear explosions, designed to create a series of artificial suns.

It is at this point, really, that even Musk must wonder if it might just be easier to try and solve a few of the problems we have in this world, rather than trying to conquer a new one.

Meanwhile, on Earth this week, Italian football executives were busy articulating their hope that they will be able to stage actual Serie A games in the United States within the next three years. “Yes, we would love to do it,” Michele Ciccarese, the league’s commercial and marketing director, told a group of journalists in New York. “Who knows, maybe in a window of one to two years potentially, we will see the league playing if the approvals come.”

Just like colonising Mars, this is not, of course, a new idea. Various European leagues have been fantasising about playing meaningful domestic games — rather than simply pre-season tune-ups — on foreign shores, and particularly in the U.S, for the better part of two decades.

The Premier League first floated the concept of a “39th game,” an extra round of fixtures tacked on to the season and staged abroad, in 2008. The suggestion triggered such a furious backlash from fans that the league has never had the nerve to make it openly again, but the prospect is raised every now and again from colleagues and collaborators with just enough plausible deniability to get away with it: Jon Miller, a president at NBC Sports, admitted he was “pushing for it” in an interview with The Athletic last year.

Other leagues do not feel the need to be quite so bashful. La Liga, the Spanish top flight, tried to stage games in the U.S. in 2018 and 2019; Javier Tebas, its bombastic president, has made it plain that as soon as FIFA grants permission for competitions to dispense with such quaint notions as national boundaries then he will do so.

In Italy, too, it is clearly a matter of some urgency. Like Spain, it has tested the water in recent years by staging its Super Cup competition in Saudi Arabia. And, like Spain, it has been encouraged by a lawsuit filed by the events organiser, Relevant Sports, against the U.S. Soccer Federation over the rights to stage games in the United States.

USMNT star Christian Pulisic celebrates scoring for Milan in Saudi Arabia (Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)

FIFA, which has long opposed the idea of competitive games being held abroad, was dropped from that lawsuit last year. It has subsequently announced that it will be reviewing its policies. The door, at last, is ajar. It seems only a matter of time before it is fully opened. The only question, now, is who will manage to plant their flag first.

“It’s always a race to try to be the trendsetter,” Ciccarese said. “Because then the followers come, and the trendsetter is the one who benefits more potentially in terms of revenues of making this thing happen.”

The problem is that nobody seems to have paused to reflect on whether all of this is worth the trouble. The principal objection to the Premier League’s plan for the 39th game was over the effect it would have on the integrity of the league; a round-robin tournament, after all, requires perfect symmetry to be legitimate. 

That can be partly overcome by moving a round of games to neutral locations, but it does not solve the problem entirely. Half of the teams in the league would effectively play one fewer home game, for a start. And even if they decided that was tolerable, there is still the pesky question of the fans back home. 

“It should be done in a way that makes sense for the club without forgetting the fans,” Ciccarese said, airily. “You cannot play a Milan derby in America because the fans in Italy will get very upset as that game has a big meaning in Italy. We have to play in a way that is respectful of our audience.”

The issue with this is that only a showpiece game — one involving two of Italy’s major teams — would attract much attention. Serie A bringing the delights of Lecce against Empoli to Los Angeles would not create a whole new generation of fans in Southern California.

Barcelona won the Spanish Super Cup in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

And then there is the impact on Major League Soccer, which would be right to feel threatened by the presence of European rivals on its turf; it is a shame that FIFA, which really should consider protecting what might generally be viewed as nascent football cultures from the predations of more established ones as part of its raison d’etre, has recused itself from that particular fight.

As heretical as it is to traditionalists — an umbrella group that encompasses most European fans — all of that might be tolerable if it felt as though the rewards might be extensive, but they are not. The issue that Serie A, La Liga and everyone else face is the might of the Premier League; English football’s television income is so great that it casts all others into shadow. 

Taking games to the United States, no matter how glamorous, is not going to solve that problem. The tens of millions of dollars in revenue that could, at a push, be generated pale in comparison to the billions the Premier League commands, particularly when offset against a landscape of collapsing international rights deals across Europe.

For Serie A — and Italian football’s top flight is not alone in this — closing that gap requires not just perseverance and dedication but genuine innovation. It demands improving Italian football’s infrastructure, building new stadiums, attracting more domestic fans to games.

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It means improving the media offering, incentivising clubs to trust in emerging players, finding ways to capture the imagination of young fans. It might take following the model laid down by Drive To Survive or Welcome to Wrexham as much as finding broadcast partners; it may mean engaging meaningfully with TikTok or YouTube. It will take time and it will take effort.

And that is why, ultimately, nobody seems to be willing to do it. The world we have is beset by problems, all of them so gnarled and tangled and fiendishly complicated that it seems easier, somehow, simply to try to start again somewhere else, to dream that one day you might be able to bask in the pure, false light of an artificial sun.

(Top photo: Milan celebrate winning the Super Cup in Riyadh in January. Ismael Adnan Yaqoob/Anadolu via Getty Images)