For anyone in attendance at the pre-season El Clasico held at the AT&T Stadium in Texas, it was clear that the departures of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have not affected Barcelona and Real Madrid’s popularity in the United States.
As they trotted across the world’s biggest sports market as part of the Soccer Champions Tour, a pre-season tournament featuring some of Europe’s biggest clubs primarily held on the U.S.’s west coast, massive crowds followed.
Madrid’s first game of the tour against AC Milan at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, welcomed 70,814 spectators; Barcelona’s clash against Arsenal at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles was watched by a sellout crowd of more than 70,000; and when they faced off for the third time in the U.S. at the AT&T Stadium, they set a record for the highest-attended El Clasico on foreign soil with 82,026 fans.
Like the Premier League’s big shots, trips to the United States during pre-season are as good as guaranteed for Barcelona and Real Madrid. Since first coming to the U.S. in 1937 to escape a country at war and to raise much-needed income for the club, Barcelona have visited 14 times.
Outside of the COVID-affected years of 2020 and 2021, they’ve stopped on American soil during pre-season every year since 2017. Their chief rivals have visited 16 times, with Real Madrid’s first tour of the Americas going as far back as 1927, where they faced a side set up by 300 Galician immigrants in New York.
And here they are, still breaking attendance records, even without the star power of Messi and Ronaldo. For many, La Liga is Real Madrid and Barcelona, but for Boris Gartner, chief executive of La Liga North America, there’s more for America in Spain’s top division than just the big two.
“Real Madrid and Barcelona take a disproportionate share of the La Liga audience in this country,” says Gartner, who has led La Liga North America since La Liga partnered with Relevent Sports, a multinational media, sports and entertainment group, in 2018. “But Atletico Madrid, year over year, have been cutting that gap. The first tier is Real Madrid and Barcelona, then, kind of on their own is Atletico, but then there is a third tier that is consistently growing and has a very hardcore following. That’s Sevilla, Valencia, (Real) Betis, Real Sociedad.”
Three of those clubs (Sevilla, Betis and Sociedad), as well as Atletico, set sail for North America on a pre-season tour arranged by La Liga. Across the four matches, over 100,000 fans attended three stadiums (Estadio Akron in Guadalajara, Estadio BBVA in Monterrey and Oracle Park in San Francisco), an average of above 25,000 supporters per game.
Judging from the television broadcast, the venues were far from capacity, but the step of bringing more clubs outside of the league’s big two is seen as a crucial one.
“Something that plays to our advantage is the cultural connection with Hispanic or Latin American players,” Gartner adds. “The Mexican following for Sevilla and Betis is huge because, for many years, Betis had the captain of the Mexican national team (Andres Guardado). When we target a specific demographic, we use the diversity in nationalities.”
According to the United States Census Bureau’s report in 2020, more than 62 million people in the United States are Hispanic, accounting for 19 per cent of all Americans, making it the second largest ethnic group in the country. It is also one of the fastest-growing groups, with the population of Hispanics increasing by almost 12 million from the 2010 report. Of that 62 million, 37.2m (61.5 per cent) are of Mexican descent.
With Mexico’s rich football heritage and the natural affinity for Spanish football due to a shared language, Mexican stars playing in La Liga are often a gold mine for La Liga North America, which has offices in New York and Guadalajara.
Like Guardado, who joined Betis in 2017, Sevilla’s Jesus Corona has been eagerly watched by Mexican national team supporters on both sides of the border since leaving Porto for La Liga last season. For the USMNT, the options are more scarce. With Yunus Musah’s departure from Valencia to AC Milan, Luca De La Torre is now the only consistent starter on a La Liga side. Sergino Dest is contracted to Barcelona but is not expected to feature much under Xavi.
But La Liga have plans to do something about it. They’ve brought their coaching and player development expertise to North America, setting up academies in Canada, Dallas, New York and Vermont to help progress the next generation of North American talent. This league-led initiative joins Villarreal and Barcelona, who have locations in Orlando, Columbus, Chicago, Austin, the Carolinas, as well as an elite residency academy in Phoenix, to set up youth bases stateside.
This year, California-born defender Julian Araujo became Barcelona’s standout success story when he transferred from LA Galaxy to Barcelona, becoming the first player to develop through Barcelona’s academy to switch from MLS to the Blaugrana’s senior side.
While it would be beneficial for the league to have as many U.S. and Mexico internationals as possible, particularly in the leadup to the 2026 World Cup, there is faith that the quality of the product and the natural affinity the Spanish-speaking population in North America has for La Liga is enough to interest new viewers and retain the league’s core fanbase.
“If Valencia have Yunus Musah, they’re going to have a lot of popularity in the United States? No, it doesn’t work like that,” says Adrian Segovia, La Liga North’s head of content and distribution. “For example, Diego Lainez. When Lainez first came to Betis, everyone in Mexico was excited.
“Everyone was saying, ‘The Mexican Messi is coming to La Liga’ – the marketing was amazing. Then after three years, his performance was terrible, and the fans started saying, ‘What happened?’ and then he came back to Mexico. The performance is more important.”
Without a doubt, the performance of the big two in recent years has helped La Liga North America on its path to growing the league’s popularity in the United States and Mexico. Real Madrid and Barcelona have continued to succeed domestically and on the continent, with Barcelona winning La Liga this season and Madrid collecting their record 14th Champions League trophy in 2022.
There have been the arrivals of new stars over that period, too. Robert Lewandowski left Bayern Munich for Barcelona before last season, joining a young side including Pedri, Gavi and Alejandro Balde – all under 21 and full Spain internationals.
In Madrid, Karim Benzema stepped out of Ronaldo’s shadow to win last year’s Ballon d’Or, and with his departure to Saudi Arabia, a host of young talent led by Vini Jr and new recruit Jude Bellingham (as well as the potential arrival of Kylian Mbappe) show the promise to lead Los Blancos to sustained future success.
“La Liga has always attracted the best talent,” says Gartner. “There is this halo of playing in La Liga and playing for one of those teams (Real Madrid and Barcelona) and winning. For me, it’s very telling that Bellingham could have gone to any club in the Premier League, but he chose to come to Real Madrid.
“There’s also another way of looking at it. Usually, when one of these big stars leave, the impact is less than you’d think. When Messi went to PSG, the conversation here (in the United States) was that nobody would watch La Liga again. The ratings actually went up that year.”
And they have steadily risen since Relevent first partnered with La Liga in 2017 to arrange the first U.S.-based El Clasico in Miami. The partnership was formalised a year later in establishing La Liga North America in 2018, which controls La Liga’s distribution and marketing plans across the U.S. and Canada.
Within a year, it had expanded to Mexico and Central America, with employees based in New York City, Toronto, Mexico City and a staff of 20 in the content studio based in Guadalajara.
Across these markets, they have specific plans to focus on varying demographics. In the United States, there are three major groups that La Liga North America’s content and distribution sector tailors unique content for: the general market audience, the first and second-generation Hispanic immigrant audience and the third-generation Hispanic audience.
According to Segovia, the general audience in the United States are “super lovers of experience.” They are generally less knowledgeable about soccer and La Liga and consume highlights rather than watching the full 90 minutes of a game. For this audience, activations and watch parties under the brand name ‘El Partidazo’ is expected to attract new fans, like when La Liga North America hosted a watch party in Los Angeles for El Clasico in March, allowing fans to watch the game alongside Real Madrid and Mexico national team legend Hugo Sanchez.
The first-generation fan follows a team in Mexico but might also follow Real Madrid or Barcelona. They’re soccer fans who have passed their love of the sport down to the second and third generations, who are somewhat of a “mix” because they probably follow American sports but are also soccer fans because of their heritage.
As the younger generation primarily consumes quick-hit content on social media platforms, La Liga’s content strategy must appeal to them also. But for Segovia, the first- and second-generation fans have the most natural “connection” with the league’s product. So, to appeal to an older audience, creating a television deal that could elevate the league was paramount.
In 2021, La Liga bought the broadcasting rights for the United States from beIN Sports and sold them to ESPN, increasing the number of homes La Liga football reaches from an estimated 12 million to over 70 million. For those who subscribe to the ESPN+ service, there is live and on-demand coverage of 380 matches a year.
“It’s a $1.4 billion deal. Before the Premier League renewed the deal with NBC, it was the highest media rights deal for any European football property,” says Gartner. “More than the growth in value that we had, which was significant, it was also the fact that we were moving from Bein Sports to the Disney Company and everything that means from our marketing and positioning perspective.
“For ESPN, the deal made a lot of sense because they were pushing ESPN+, and La Liga’s audience is a highly coveted audience for media companies in general, but even more for streaming services as it’s that young, diverse Hispanic audience they desperately need. It was a win-win on all sides. We’ve grown our audience significantly from what we had before.”
With the growth in TV audiences and consistently high attendance in pre-season matches comes a growing appetite from the league to bring a competitive fixture to the United States.
Initial plans to bring a contest between Barcelona and Girona, a Catalan derby, to the United States in 2019 were scuppered, but hope is far from lost. After all, it was one of the primary aims when Relevent and La Liga announced their deal five years ago.
“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” Boris Gartner, chief executive of La Liga North America, tells The Athletic. “As the sport continues to grow in this country, and fans get more sophisticated, and they’re used to watching competitive games, they’ll know that players play differently when they’re fighting for three points than when they’re not.
“It’s the right next evolution, and it’s not something that La Liga came up with out of the blue. There was the 39th Premier League game idea a while back, and NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL have all done it incredibly successfully. It’s the natural evolution of a global sport (…) it’s a win-win for the league, the club it’s exporting and for the local market.”
But for a La Liga game to be played in the United States, a few hurdles would have to be cleared. When Relevent Sports Group attempted to facilitate the staging of a La Liga match in the U.S. in 2018, FIFA created a new policy to prevent such a move, and U.S. Soccer refused to sanction the game based on that policy. This prompted a legal battle that is still ongoing.
Still, with La Liga president Javier Tebas estimating the league will earn around 200 million euros from playing games in the United States before La Liga’s partnership with Relevent is up for renewal, the growth of the league, whether via television, social media or bringing live matches to the States, feels entirely inevitable.
(Photo: Javier Vicencio / Eyepix Group/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
