COLUMN: Everything for sale, but Villarreal and Barcelona have no concept of value

Jon Driscoll can be found on social media here, and if you’re hungry for more, tune into his weekly La Liga podcast with Terry Gibson. You can also read more from Driscoll in his two books Get It Kicked and The Fifty.

Given how Villarreal performed in their most previewed home game ever, there must be plenty of their faithful fans wishing that, after all, they had been able to claim their 20% season ticket discount and let their team misfire 7,500km away in Miami. It was a well-chosen fixture to be sold off for several million fistfuls of dollars. With some due disrespect, the Villarreal’s core fans are not the hardest of hardcore. And the Yellow Submarine hadn’t won this fixture since 2007 when their goals were scored by Marcos Senna, who is now a Global Ambassador for the club, and Santi Cazorla, who is (checks notes) still a La Liga midfielder. The modern-day Villarreal fan was offered generous bribes to give up their home fixture: free tickets to the HardRock Stadium, flights, alternative matches, season ticket discounts. It was the wider football community whose outrage was decisive in the decision by promoters Relevent to decide it wasn’t worth the fuss. 

Spare a thought for the unfortunate American fan. They missed out on witnessing up close and in the flesh such delights as Nicolas Pepe missing from six yards, Santi Comesana giving away a totally avoidable penalty, and Renato Veiga attempting to scissor Lamine Yamal in half. Barcelona weren’t great but then it was their ninth game in a month since resuming after the November international break; how much better they would have been with an eleven-hour flight added in?

FC Barcelona have already surpassed last season's league numbers, collecting 46 points from 18 matches, 8 more than at the same stage last year. [@jordicardero] pic.twitter.com/Xzl5FjpRDM

— barcacentre (@barcacentre) December 22, 2025

It is not like American fans of soccer are not being given the opportunity to watch the sport with their own eyes. Last summer’s Club World Cup was in the USA, most of the World Club is there next summer, and every big European club seems to be desperate to head stateside for their post- and/or pre-season tours, before heading home to complain about fixture congestion for the following nine months. Believe me, the American soccer nut will see plenty of content about the beautiful round ball game and hear multiple renditions of Donald Trump’s non-anecdote about Pele before the summer of ’26 is out.

So, if the Americans didn’t need Villarreal-Barcelona, does Spanish football need them? Obviously, La Liga and Javier Tebas think so. There is money in America, if you know where to look, and fans are used to paying hefty prices to watch sport. Tebas is driven by a sense of grievance about Premier League wealth and thinks selling off a fixture here or there will provide useful fuel in his pursuit of the wealthy English. Note: here “English” can refer to football clubs owned by American billionaires and Middle Eastern oil states. Is cash generation the ultimate goal of football’s custodians?

The Spanish haven’t been able to rival the eye-watering sums paid by TV-watching fans in the UK and Ireland or match the Premier League’s appeal to the global viewer, despite the allure of La Liga’s least attractive games being offered as standalone fixtures every Friday and Monday evening. So, how to close that gap? Was the hope that passing billionaires might stop by the HardRock Stadium and decide to buy Getafe or Levante? 

You see, in the world of football everything is for sale. How can a tournament be improved? More games, of course. And why not see whether you can move it to Saudi Arabia, or Qatar, or even a billionaire’s private island? Fixture times? Yes, let’s assume that the Chinese are desperate to watch Rayo Vallecano versus Mallorca and put it on a Sunday lunchtime. Stadium names? Sold. FC Barcelona’s future revenue? Yours, for the right price. Even the TV close ups of supporters at grounds are a promotional opportunity; lovely looking young tourists make better viewing that wrinkly locals.

As an English kid I grew up with English football. What first attracted me to watching football from other countries wasn’t the similarity but the differences. In Spain, that meant Barcelona’s story of football intertwined with resistance to Franco’s regime, it meant Basque players at Basque clubs, and Real Madrid as the embodiment of glamour with superstars on a Saturday or Sunday night, while English players were at the pub. It was slower but cleverer than I was used to watching. I don’t want Spanish football to look like football in every other country.

There are great things about internationalism, but who wants an amorphous global mush where we all do the same things and act in the same way? Diversity is as much about preserving differences as celebrating new ideas. I don’t want the Americanised, the petrodollar-fueled, or the increasingly finance-focused version of Spanish football. Nor do I want a European or Global Superleague, and if that means the people who have a direct economic interest in La Liga have to get richer more slowly, then that is a sacrifice I am happy for them to make. Sunday’s match was imperfect, but I am delighted that it was played in front of 21,000 fans in the sleepy surrounds of Vila-real.

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