La Liga president Javier Tebas has confirmed plans for league games to be played overseas, starting with fixtures in the United States in the 2025/26 season.
La Liga has been working on playing league matches on foreign shores for several years, particularly in the US where Hispanic communities have made the country the league’s biggest market outside of Spain.
An attempt to stage a game between Barcelona and Girona in Miami in 2018 was blocked by FIFA and the US Soccer Federation. However, the organization working with La Liga to stage the game, Relevant – an events promoter created by Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross – launched an anti-trust lawsuit against the governing bodies.
An out-of-court agreement was reached with FIFA earlier this month on the understanding the organization would change its rules, opening the door for leagues to stage competitive games internationally. Litigation with US Soccer is ongoing.
Tebas hopes Real Madrid and Barcelona – who are both touring the US for pre-season this summer, including a rare El Classico friendly – will be in competitive action in America within the next two years.
“I think it could be in the 2025-26 season, but La Liga will play official matches abroad,” Tebas told Expansion.
“An official match in the U.S. will strengthen our position in the North American market, which is the second market for La Liga after Spain.”
Tebas added that other leagues have been trying to follow a similar path, with league matches overseas an incredibly lucrative opportunity for clubs. But doing so will inevitably anger match-going fans back home.
Javier Tebas hopes for La Liga games to be staged in the US within two years ( Image: Oscar J. Barroso/Europa Press via Getty Images)
Tebas did not confirm how many games each team would be expected to play overseas each season, but he said the move has been made to secure La Liga’s place as one of the world’s elite leagues against the backdrop of the growing financial power of the Premier League, plus the huge investment made in the Saudi Pro League.
“Other very competitive leagues are coming so we cannot always do the same thing, but we cannot allow them to overtake us,” he added.
It will not be the first entry Spanish football has made into other markets, with the Supercopa – Spain’s version of the Community Shield – being staged in Saudi Arabia in four of the past five seasons.
In the same interview, Tebas stood by his stance that Spanish football does not need goal-line technology, despite the huge moment of controversy in Sunday’s El Classico.
Barca forward Lamine Yamal believed he had scored at the Bernabeu to put his team 2-1 in front, but no goal was awarded due to a lack of clear evidence available to the VAR.
Jude Bellingham scored a late winner in a 3-2 victory for Champions-elect Real.
La Liga is the only one of Europe’s top five leagues that does not use Hawkeye goal-line technology, which was first used in the Premier League in 2014 and has been a huge success. Instead, La Liga relies on VAR cameras to make goal-line decisions due to an unwillingness to pay for the technology, which costs around £3million per season.
