My local readers will likely be wondering why this post is appearing; UK readers will probably already be bristling at the title. The latter is entirely intentional of course, although as a native Brit who has spent 36 years living in the US it looks totally natural.
The reason for this is that with the new European season under way there has been some griping (mostly on X and other social media platforms) that the increased American ownership of English clubs (Welsh ones too, of course; and Wrexham isn’t the only one) has led to Americanization of the English game. That ownership level is reaching stratospheric levels: per a recent New York Times report, the 20 current Premier League teams have an overall American ownership of 49%, dwarfing even British ownership at just 22%. 4 teams are 100% owned by US interests and another 7 are majority US-owned (and among those Everton is at 99.5%, as near to 100% as makes no difference). With that, it seems self-evident that American management principles—and everything that goes with them—should become part of the English game. Or so logic dictates.
Birmingham City in the EFL Championship is how I came into this conversation, which was in part prompted by the recent Amazon docuseries Built in Birmingham: Brady & the Blues. However, it may surprise some that the Blues are not in fact fully American-owned. They are not even majority American-owned. The prominence of Tom Wagner of Knighthead Capital and NFL star Tom Brady would tend to suggest otherwise, but in fact the club remains 51.7% under Chinese ownership (Trillion Trophy Asia via Birmingham Sports Holdings). Knighthead has just under 46% and Brady has the remaining 3.3%. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the Yanks are running the show.
And if the “USA! USA!” chants at St. Andrews are anything to go by, Blues fans seem quite happy with the situation. And that’s in spite of the huge missteps the new management made in its first year. They learned the lesson and made the necessary corrections and ended up with a massive record-setting season.
But what exactly does it mean that the game is being Americanized? Well, to be honest, not much really.
I mentioned American management principles above. Certainly those are influential, but how different are they really from the British ones? Sports management in the US is perhaps somewhat more brutal than in other industries. Head coaches in all sports here live on the brink of unemployment unless they have a very tolerant ownership or an ironclad contract. Failure is not generally tolerated well. It doesn’t help that fans have come to expect fast action on that front. In the USL Championship (the Birmingham Legion’s league) 13 of 24 head coaches are in their first season; as of this writing one has been in place just 15 days. In MLS 16 of 30 in the same position. 54% of the head coaches in the US’ top two tiers have been replaced in the past year and a good fraction of those since the season began this year.
The same is true of only 6 Premier League head coaches, although only 7 have been around more than 2 years. In the Championship just 5 have been around more than a year and only 3 have been around longer than 2 years. Those 5 include the Blues’ Chris Davies and Wrexham’s Paul Parkinson, who have technically only been Championship managers for a couple of weeks. Parkinson is also the league’s longest-tenured gaffer; who does he work for? Hmmm…
Well, OK, he’s been extremely successful, so that makes sense. But is this constant hiring and firing truly influenced by the influx of American owners? Well, probably, but it is perhaps just an acceleration of what was already happening anyway.
As for what happens on the field, the most obvious change is the spectacle surrounding the actual game. I hear complaints about things such as fireworks and smoke during walkouts. I assume the issue the gripers have is that this is entirely unnecessary and perhaps cheesy and distracting from the sport itself. Well, certainly the first two, but so what? Sports are meant to be fun and this helps to hype the crowd up. Fireworks, smoke and flashing stadium lights also tend to occur with home team goals here, for exactly the same reasons; that does not appear to happen in Europe to anywhere near the same degree.
It’s all part of the entertainment. And, let’s face it, ever since the invention of the movie camera entertainment worldwide has been massively dominated by the US. As the US goes, so goes the globe.
Also not happening in Europe are two other major US sports rituals. First—and this is a huge opportunity missed, imho—where are the cheerleaders? Get with the program. Second, and more significant, is that all US sports events at the high school, college and professional levels are preceded by a rendition of the national anthem (and the Canadian anthem when Canadian teams are included in the league and are visiting). This is both a patriotic event and a chance for local musicians to perform in front of large crowds. It simply does not happen in Europe. And that’s not to suggest that Europeans are any less patriotic than Americans; I know that is not true. If anything, English fans are rabidly patriotic and flag displays are everywhere at games. Probably more than you would see here in fact. However, they have a habit of writing messages on the flag (mostly city names), which is an absolute no-no in the US. So there’s one British tradition that has not been affected.
One thing annoyingly prevalent in Amerian sports that simply cannot be instituted in soccer, at least not without completey changing the laws of the game, is the degree of commercialization. By which I mean the number of ads seen during a TV broadcast. Most US sports have over the years developed to accommodate the demands of TV by allowing for as many breaks in the action as possible to create time for ad breaks. Baseball with its many interruptions in play was tailor-made for that anyway; football, basketball and hockey all have timeout rules that provide for the same.
Not so in soccer and this has hampered its growth as a spectator sport in the US. Yes, the scorebug usually includes a carousel of small ads (which are easy to ignore), various in-game events are “sponsored” by advertisers and of course player kits are littered with sponsor logos, but it’s hardly the same and cannot generate the same revenue. Even ticket prices are nowhere near as high (which should make soccer an attractive option for live attendance but doesn’t quite seem to do so).
Here’s another thing in soccer that US sports by and large do not have: fee-based transfers. You would think in a country where profits and value are highly esteemed that player transactions would be astronomically expensive. In fact, they are not, other than negotiating a salary with the player. Transfers—”trades” as they are mostly called—usually include other forms of consideration. Often these will include high draft picks, player swaps and other such things. Drafts (which do exist in US soccer) are a uniquely American thing of course, as the high school to college to pro progression is inherent in the US sports system but not elsewhere.
The draft, by the way, is an oddly egalitarian idea that is counter to the meritocracy of US culture in general. The idea is, basically, to improve competitiveness within a league by giving teams who performed relatively poorly higher positions in the drafting order so they have their choice of the better players coming out of college. Since draft picks can be traded and players are under no obligation to either enter the draft play for the team that selects them it doesn’t really work out as intended.
And this is where the tables are turned. Meritocracy exists in soccer, of course, through promotion and relegation. Pro/rel is an utterly alien concept for US sports fans who often need to have it explained in detail. Most US sports have lower levels, of course, but there is no chance for teams at lower levels to progress to higher leagues. Baseball is the most obvious case of this; below Major League Baseball, is, naturally enough, Minor League Baseball, which has 5 tiers in all. Even within MiLB there is no pro/rel.
In large part this is because of the franchising system used by pro sports leagues in the US. Basically, when buying into a league (which of course is progressively more expensive the higher up the league you go) you get similar privileges as you would when purchasing any other business. That includes two key items: obviously, membership in the league (and, no, there are no parachute payments) but also territorial rights.
That is, the league agrees not to place another team within the defined market you bought into. Which, for the most part, eliminates local derbies, which are of course a very big thing in soccer, especially in the UK. True local derbies do exist here, but often they result from the merger of two competing leagues that both had teams in the same market. MLB, the NFL, the NBA and the NHL have all done this and so do have a few cities with more than one team. In soccer, the current professional league standards established by USSF (our FA) pretty much eliminate the possibility of pro/rel. That being said, the USL is planning to institute pro/rel within its pro tiers in the next few years and has been generally applauded by soccer fans here for the move. It will be the first time a fully professional league has ever attempted it and the USL faces some major hurdles to get it done.
That being sad, rivalries do exist, but are generally over much greater distances (except perhaps in the northeast, where large cities are relatively close together). For example, the oldest rivalry in the NFL (with teams not moving) is the Chicago Bears-Green Bay Packers. That dates back to 1921. The distance between the stadiums? 211 miles. Hardly local even for the US, where long distance travel is commonplace. No surprise then that away fan sections are pretty small (if they exist at all).
So, is English soccer becoming Americanized? To a very small extent, in the final analysis. And the influence goes both ways: American owners will see how European sports are managed and will want to import those aspects of them that they deem positive. And in some ways they are managed in a more American style than US teams. Overall, though, the link will remain simply financial; there are a limited number of sports teams available for purchase here in the US, especially not financially attractive ones, and European leagues are apparently littered with such opportunities. At least, until the supply dries up.
