Tradition, Dislocation and Domestic Matches Abroad 

‘Tradition’ is a notoriously pervasive, and hence often quite empty, label in the world of football. The term gets relentlessly brandished in the discourse surrounding the game in order to justify, condone and condemn any and all things as deemed fit by the wielder. While finding any consensus about what such Tradition (capitalising the word feels appropriate because it is always a singular and ultimate category, frequently prefixed with a solemn ‘the’) constitutes feels quite pointless, it is easier to put fingers on a broad agreement around whatever is outside the pale of Tradition. In a process marked by the homogenising tendencies of neoliberalism, there has been a consistent drive towards an obsessive commercialisation of the game and a near-complete gentrification of the socio-cultural space that it used to occupy.

This process runs counter to the many cherished ideals that football celebrates as tradition. Football has long been a product and a profitable one at that, but never before was it necessary to uproot the product from the immediate heterogeneous set of contexts to render it fit for a global market. In the process, football, at least at the highest levels, loses whatever rustic charm and unique sense of character it had remaining and becomes increasingly uniform. That marketable uniformity has become a feature of top-level football at its most profitable and inevitably the most soul-less form, completely unrecognisable from what was once, despite the imperfections, dubbed the people’s game.  

UEFA’s ‘reluctant’ acceptance of the proposal for hosting ‘domestic’ league matches outside the country (precisely put, outside the continent) finally opens a Pandora’s box. The concept of a fair contest based on home and away matches has been the bedrock of the football league system. This decision upends what used to be one of the strictest non-negotiables in the game. That is why it is unnerving to hear La Liga President Javier Tebas claiming emphatically that this seismic change has somehow been keeping with the Tradition of the game, rather than betraying it. Tebas has long been an unapologetic crusader of staging domestic games internationally.

The lucrative markets in West Asia and the USA provide a great opportunity to narrow the ever-expanding gulf between the commercial juggernaut that is the Premier League and the rest. This gulf is sustained and widened by the gigantic broadcast deals that the Premier League commands because of its reputation for selling the best product in the market of live football. The global outreach of the Premier League is a matter of envy and inspiration for the rest of the top five leagues, which house teams that are considered powerhouses in club football but are getting consistently and massively outspent (which broadly correlates to being outplayed, Q.E.D.) by even mid-ranking Premier League outfits.

In such an environment where commercialisation facilitates inequality and that inequality becomes the justification of more rampant commercialisation, Tebas’s claims about standing by Tradition do not sound like a mere rhetorical flourish. Rather, it sounds ominous. What we are seeing in front of our eyes is a reimagination of what football’s traditions are made of. Such reimaginations have certainly happened before. Football has been imagined as upholding a wide range of different ideals during its fascinating historical trajectory. But never before was Tradition defined by blatant dislocation. 

The community spirit that the game has been proud of for more than a century and a quarter, something so intrinsic to the discourse around the game, has lived a celebrated life. Once upon a time, and not that long ago, most players of a top-level club still used to come from the local catchment area. Nowadays, that seems like an alien prospect. What seems integral still is the presence of local fans. Football clubs are entities fundamentally representative of local communities, but such a status seems incompatible with the globalising tendency at the top level of the sport.

Rising ticket prices, emphasis on corporate hospitality offerings, a match-day experience tailored to the needs of the tourists – all of these indicate the growing distance between the clubs operating at the highest level of the game and the people of the local communities that had sustained them and, in turn, have been represented by them for so long. Staging matches on a different continent feels like a natural and deeply unfortunate follow-up to such a process of alienation. No wonder Tebas alluded to the logic of exports when justifying his claim about this being consistent with Tradition. It is essentially an economic logic, one that is made even more ludicrous because it paradoxically claims to be a tool to mitigate the effects of the very system that it actively perpetrates.