"But still they come every other weekend, and buy horchata from the stalls out the front, and sit with the same old friends in the same old bars with the same old faded photos on the wall. Because for all that has changed over the years, this is still their town, their team, their tradition. And when their beloved Villarreal are playing there is nowhere else they would rather be."
"But when they play their home game against Barcelona the week before Christmas, the Estadio de la Ceramica is likely to be sitting empty. For the small industrial town of 50,000 just off the A7 motorway, it will feel just like any other night. The classic club anthems will reverberate not in Castellon but more than 4,000 miles away in the Miami suburbs. And football's dystopian, fungible future will never have been closer to becoming its dystopian, fungible present."
Villarreal's stadium has been modernized with wraparound LED screens, an immersive museum, and a name change, yet local fans retain traditions and continue attending. La Liga has requested permission to move Villarreal v Barcelona to Miami, while Serie A has sought to move Milan v Como to Perth. UEFA's executive committee will consider the requests, with further approvals required from FIFA, US Soccer, the Asian Football Confederation, Football Australia and others. In practice these additional permissions are seen as the last formal hurdle. Establishing a precedent for playing domestic fixtures abroad would make such moves effectively irreversible. Javier Tebas has long promoted exporting league fixtures to expand revenue.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]