The idea of taking the Premier League product overseas isn't new.
Pre-season tours have long been a staple of preparations for Premier League sides, as much about growing fan bases and commercial revenue as adequately sharpening up ahead of a new campaign.
Having seen two summers disrupted by the pandemic as international travel ground to a near halt, the summer of 2022 saw Liverpool head to the Far East for games in Thailand and Singapore, fixtures that allowed supporters in one of the Reds' key markets to get up close and personal with their heroes after the enforced break.
Next year it is likely that the Reds will head to the US, another key market and the home of its ownership, Fenway Sports Group, having spent time there last in 2019.
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But what about regular season games? The NFL, MLB and NBA have all taken regular season games from the US over to the UK in recent years, with Tottenham Hotspur's £1bn stadium evening having the ability to host such games as an important part of their business plan for the future.
The Premier League is the most watched football league on the planet, its popularity is completely unparalleled. It is its international appeal that has driven up media revenues to the point where they are now, this past year, worth more than domestic rights for the very first time as the League landed a £10bn deal at home and abroad for the next cycle. The money that delivers for the Premier League member clubs enables the wild spending, the major wages and transfer fees. The international appeal and the commercial revenues that are tapped into as a result aid the investment into what takes to the pitch.
The idea of taking a game that matters, a Premier League clash, overseas is something that isn't new either. Back in 2008 former Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore presented the idea of a '39th game', one that was roundly by fans bound to a sense of tradition for the English game that makes it so unique among its counterparts across the globe.
Fourteen years have passed since then and Scudamore, who served as an advisor to Gerry Cardinale's RedBall Acquisition Corp, the special purpose acquisition company that had looked at taking a stake in Liverpool owners FSG before Cardinale opted to conclude an 11 per cent investment deal in FSG for $750m through his RedBird Capital Partners fund in March 2021, believes that the plan will happen at some stage, although stressed that it was by no means imminent, despite the apparent fertile market conditions for such an endeavour.
Speaking to the Athletic, Scudamore said: "You are talking to the person, as you well know, who bears the scars of having the temerity to suggest the Premier League should play abroad. I think it was February 8, 2008.
"In some ways, it’s closer and yet further away. It goes back to my original point. Until you can convince the fanbase that this is a worthwhile thing to do, for the right reasons, it’s further away than it’s ever seemed. But I think it will happen. I just don’t know when or how. It just looks hard from here."
Scudamore conceded that the idea of a '39th game' was flawed, and that it would have been easier to take a mid-season game abroad. But with the UEFA calendar ever busier, and managers, Reds boss Jurgen Klopp at the forefront, being vocal on the pressures that places on teams, the plan to introduce it in the modern era is fraught with problems.
He added: "Had it been one single round, midway through the season — and were on an alternate year basis, where you lost a home game once every two years — and it was just a regular fixture programme, it would have been an easier thing to do. But it would have been much easier to do it in 2007 or 2008 than it was in 2017 or 2018, or than it’s going to be in 2027 or 2028. It’s just hard.
"While I hope UEFA see off any future Super League threats, the people singularly responsible for calendar congestion are UEFA. If you go back to when the Premier League started, we were 22 clubs, not 20; FA Cup replays went on forever; all League Cup games were two-legged. FIFA, in fairness, haven’t increased the international dates much. There’s normally eight or nine over a two-year period. FIFA aren’t the problem. UEFA have come along and squeezed the pips in (the calendar) until it’s broken. The fixture calendar problem is nobody’s other than UEFA’s."
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