The NFL recently played in Wembley Stadium, the home of the English national football (soccer) team. The NHL has played games in England, Czech Republic, Sweden, and has talked about putting franchises in Europe. English Premiership teams tour abroad annually as part of their pre-season training, and the growth of Major League Soccer in North America has been remarkable. One thing can be taken from this: Sports are showing international tendencies.
Major sports teams have long been broadcasted overseas and been able to gather significant global viewership. Playing overseas matches would seem natural. Trends seem to suggest internationalization of sports is occurring. Many leagues exist that allow championship teams from different countries to compete and it’s becoming increasingly to see marquee players transfer across the entire globe. English footballer David Beckham moving from Spain to Los Angeles illustrates this trend.
But there are issues behind this. Do leagues playing international games serve the interests of its original fan groups? Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson has been quoted opposing the concept of the English premiership playing regular season games in the United States. At the same time, many NHL fans feel playing games in Europe has been a distracting sideshow at best.
Factor in disputes between leagues. Without agreements between leagues, legalities of different countries have a negative impact on sport. Alexander Radulov of the NHL’s Nashville Predators recently walked away from an existing NHL contract to play for a Russian team. The NHL threw a fit but in reality the NHL had been stealing European players for decades. There was not much the NHL could legally do to stop Radulov once he was in Russia. Factor in the NHL draft and an internal player trading system, it is clear that American leagues have a very different way of doing things that do not favour cooperation with the rest of the world. That is not even taking complex finances into account – salary caps, luxury taxes, trading penalties, player unions – which are only complicated by the American credit crisis. Many professional teams in the world are on shaky financial grounding, after all, and simply can’t handle the financial implications of international agreements.
Professional sports have clearly seen a recent trend of internationalism. It will be interesting to see if this fragile system strengthens or disappears in favour of traditional domestic markets. Should international play be left for teams representing entire countries, or can traditionally domestic teams play on a global stage?
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[...] have previously spoken of the growing internationalism of profesional sports wherein the ellusion was made to the difficult positions of national hockey league franchises in the [...]