London’s special relationship with US shows power of the superbrand as MLB arrives in capital

Getty Images
Dan Jones9 May 2018

The news that the London Stadium will host Europe’s first-ever Major League Baseball matches in 2019 is a boon to a sporting special relationship that has grown stronger with every year of the last decade.

The Atlantic once seemed a wall between two English-speaking nations with profoundly — proudly — divergent sporting cultures. That ocean is now a bridge for two-way sporting traffic.

When MLB arrives, we will have regular-season football, basketball and baseball matches staged annually in the capital. The NBA comes to the O2 once a year: in January it hosted Philadelphia 76ers v Boston Celtics. This October, there will be three NFL games in London: one at the revamped White Hart Lane and two at Wembley Stadium, including Philadelphia Eagles v Jacksonville Jaguars. Hell, one day we may even get a Wrestlemania.

In return, many British sporting sides now tour the US throughout the year. At present, this is usually a B-list sort of arrangement. But the biggest Premier League football clubs now view US pre-season tours as a no-brainer, while rugby union has been dipping its toes in, too.

Saracens’ Premiership match against Newcastle last autumn went off half-cocked in front of a lukewarm Philadelphia crowd, but Wales will play South Africa next month at the RFK Stadium in Washington DC, hoping perhaps to emulate something of the success of Ireland’s dazzling win over the All Blacks in Chicago in 2016.

This reciprocal visitation is great for fans and fanbases, as pond-hopping within all sporting codes expands from an enjoyable novelty to a familiar feature of the calendar. Which is why the talk of a permanent London-based MLB (and NFL) franchise is more than pie in the sky.

Unimaginable? Impractical? Once, yes, but no longer. The days when Brits could write off American sports as puzzling and foreign, and disdain the Yanks for using the word ‘soccer’ are gone. Sport in an interconnected, online world is rapidly disconnecting from localised loyalties, as fans gravitate to sporting superbrands: a kid growing up in London today would see nothing especially odd or contradictory about supporting Manchester City, Sunrisers Hyderabad and the Boston Red Sox. A stadium is only a stage. Sports marketeers and financiers realised this some time ago, which is why they have been so busy building links between American and British sports where it really counts — in the boardrooms and on the trading floor.

It is a generation since the Glazer family hitched Manchester United to their sporting bandwagon, and since then US dollars have piled into British sport to the extent that Shahid Khan, the would-be buyer of Wembley, has been talking about hosting not only a World Cup Final but the Superbowl in London.

The obvious objection in all this Americanisation of British sport is that it’s not fair; that the balance of trade is heavily one-sided; that we are seeing (and permitting) a form of hostile takeover. These are not worries to just wave away, although amid the hullaballoo of an MLB game next summer, it will be easy to put the argument off for another day.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in