How European soccer clubs are trying to woo U.S. fans: Local heroes, streaming and matches abroad (2024)

Within hours of the finals of the European Championship and Copa America on July 14, attention will turn to pre-season for many of the most famous clubs in Europe.

Manchester United have a friendly match against Norwegian side Rosenborg on July 15, while Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa have games two days later. Yet the main event of pre-season is the now customary money-spinning tour where European clubs travel thousands of miles across the world with the objective of growing their fanbase, consolidating ties with existing supporters and unlocking fresh revenue potential.

This summer, the United States is the location of choice for many of Europe’s largest clubs. Premier League clubs Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Wolves, Crystal Palace, West Ham and Bournemouth will all be in the United States, along with League One side Wrexham, who have become a streaming sensation under the ownership of actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. La Liga giants Real Madrid and Barcelona will also be in the States, along with AC Milan from Italy. Arsenal and Chelsea’s women’s sides are also crossing over the Atlantic this summer to face NWSL side Gotham.

The motivations are hardly surprising. The U.S. is the centre of the football universe for much of the next decade, starting this summer with Copa America before FIFA’s revamped Club World Cup in 2025, the men’s World Cup in 2026 (which will also take place in Mexico and Canada), the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028 and a bid for the U.S. and Mexico to jointly host the women’s World Cup in 2031.

Last week, the Men in Blazers’ soccer-focused media company released a report, conducted in tandem with market research firm YouGov, which revealed key insights that underline why European clubs are investing in the U.S. market. YouGov’s global fan profiles revealed an 88 per cent growth between 2021 and 2024 in Americans who indicate they are “somewhat interested” in the Premier League, or consider it among their “top interests”, taking the overall figure up to 23 per cent.

Little wonder then, that 10 Premier League clubs, seven of which have substantial U.S. influence among their ownership, are venturing Stateside this summer. The U.S. is also a key broadcast market for these clubs, as NBC’s six-year contract to broadcast the Premier League is worth $450million (£356m at current rates) per season. The challenge, however, is how to turn these people into loyal supporters who will spend money with a given club. The survey involved polling 9,123 members of Men in Blazer’s audience and demonstrated there is polygamy to U.S. support: 46 per cent said they support three or more football teams, 32 per cent said they support two, and 24 per cent said they support a single team.

How, therefore, do clubs ensure that their U.S. fandom remains “sticky”? What lessons can be learned from U.S. sports? How big a part will streaming and TV play? And are all these initiatives steps towards us seeing English league matches played on U.S. soil?

Last summer, as the Italian club AC Milan’s recruitment department was trying to sign USMNT forward Christian Pulisic from Chelsea, its commercial department was in talks with MSC Cruises to become the sleeve partner on Milan’s kits. MSC is a Swiss-Italian cruise company but it is a global enterprise, for which the U.S. is a priority market.

“One of the big reasons why MSC happened was while we we were in negotiations, we announced Pulisic as a player,” says Maikel Oettle, Milan’s commercial director. “We also made it very clear to MSC that there is a firm commitment from Milan to travel to the U.S. So last year we did the west coast. This year we’re going to do the east coast, playing Manchester City, Real Madrid and Barcelona.”

Milan were already an established force in America. They are owned by Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital, which acquired the club for $1.2billion in 2022. As part of that agreement, the New York Yankees took a minority stake and Randy Levine, the Yankees president, joined the club’s board of directors.

Pulisic, who has eight million Instagram followers (half the amount of Milan itself) was joined at his new club by his USMNT team-mate Yunus Musah, who signed from Spanish club Valencia last summer. In the Men in Blazers survey, 61 per cent said that they were “much more interested” or “somewhat more interested” in Milan since the U.S. pair joined the club.

Oettle says: “A local hero makes a massive difference. I’m German, I played tennis all my life, probably thanks to Boris Becker. But there is no turnkey solution of signing one player and then tomorrow, without doing anything, you will have incredible results. It’s more of a compound effect of doing the right thing continuously. One of these right things is definitely leveraging people like Christian and Yunus in our communication and the way we push our merchandise.

“At the end of our first season with those two, the U.S. is now by far our second-biggest market in terms of e-commerce and the revenue and volumes of orders that we’re getting. We’re roughly 130 per cent up in terms of volume that is coming out of the U.S. versus last year, which to a big extent is the result of Christian having a killer breakout season at AC Milan and also Yunus doing really well.”

But what happens to those fans if and when Pulisic leaves? Are they fans of the player or Milan?

“You see this in other sports too,” says Oettle. “You have the LeBrons that cause exactly the same (in that a fan might have followed NBA star LeBron James when he moved teams). Let’s say with Christian, we need to make sure we stay relevant enough that we remain sticky once the player leaves.

“A local hero is a great tool for fan acquisition but you must stay fresh… and be at the intersection of sports, entertainment and culture, tapping into the worlds of fashion, music, gaming, trying to diversify your brand as much as possible in the different interest fields of those young fans because they are indeed very fickle. Today they play Fortnite, tomorrow they watch AC Milan, and the day after they are following the NBA finals and so on.”

Milan have taken other lessons from the U.S. Owners RedBird recently organised a trip for Milan executives to meet counterparts at the Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins, to take learnings that might be applied to European football.

“One of the results that came out of this was us creating the equivalent of front-row seats that you can find in the NBA in our stadium,” says Oettle, “which is a product that doesn’t exist in football, but is now right on top of the tunnel. You have 14 premium seats with concierge service, like in the NBA.

“But then we also bundled this with field passes, which is a product from the NFL. You never want to jeopardise the performance on the pitch. But we see this as an amazing experience and we need to give access on the field for people to have a chance to high-five the players when they come out for the warm up and then Zlatan (Ibrahimovic, the former Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona striker, now Milan’s technical director) will be standing right next to them watching the warm up, taking pictures, shaking hands.”

One major way to attract growth is storytelling via streaming. This has been most vividly encapsulated by the rise of Wrexham, who last summer sold out a 50,000-seat stadium in North Carolina after capitalising on the remarkable success of Welcome to Wrexham, the FX docuseries that has charted their rise from National League to League One (the fifth tier of English football to the third) under Hollywood ownership. Milan have noted this success and are exploring similar options. Wrexham’s chief executive Michael Williamson claims the series records up to four million views per episode.

“If you put us in context with Major League Soccer, the average viewership was around 343,000 (before MLS began a contract with Apple in 2022),” he says. “For a match for the MLS Cup, it was around 890,000 combined. It is different in the sense that we’re talking about a documentary versus a 90-minute match. So it’s not comparing apples to apples. But I’ve been on the ground in Wrexham, in the team store and the number of American people who add Wrexham as a destination on their UK tour or a UK visit shocked me. We have people coming in here literally by the busloads.”

Wrexham also recorded “significantly higher” viewing figures from the U.S. than any other EFL club last season, says Williamson. Last summer, they played Manchester United and Chelsea in the States and, this summer, they will once again play Chelsea at Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco, as well as Bournemouth in Santa Barbara and MLS Vancouver Whitecaps in a Canadian homecoming for owner Reynolds.

This week it emerged that Wrexham’s League One rivals Birmingham City (where NFL icon Tom Brady is linked to the club’s ownership) had asked the English Football League whether they may be able to take their domestic fixture against Wrexham to be played in the United States. Football’s governing body FIFA has recently indicated it may change the rules to allow regular-season competitions to play one-off games in the U.S., after all. But Reynolds insisted Wrexham were not part of this discussion, saying he “agreed” with a Wrexham fan on Twitter who said it would “go against every single one of the ‘guiding principles’ you stated publicly before even buying the club.”

Wrexham’s CEO Williamson, speaking generally about the idea of taking games outside their domestic league, points to the NFL taking games to Europe. “They understand that it’s important to have competitive matches going to those new markets and those expanding markets in order to be able to expand their fan base,” he adds. “Football clubs are community organisations first and foremost but they’re also global brands. And that’s what you’re seeing a lot of these leagues understand.”

He warns, however, of logistical challenges: “EFL clubs are playing 50-plus matches during the course of a season, between all the cups. There is wear and tear on players, a lot of demand on the staff. So when you add in the logistical challenges of, ‘hey, it’s not a two-hour bus ride, but rather an eight-hour flight with a five-hour time difference,’ that just makes it challenging to actually execute.

“The challenge that you have to balance is how do you make sure that your local fanbase and your local community still feels connected and that you’re not just moving an important game away from them for marketing or commercial purposes. That’s important. It is an open league. So promotion and relegation have real impact. And so you want the best opportunity as a club to be able to create an environment where it’s difficult for an opposing club to come into.”

Milan’s commercial director Oettle says that any plan to take fixtures abroad must be thought through, rather than a short-term cash grab.

“What is very important for us is if we make those decisions to take our games — and that could be domestic games which are decided at the league level — there’s a certain level of governance going on…. The idea is not to take AC Milan to New York, play a friendly at the Yankee Stadium and leave again without an impact. If we go there, what can we leave behind? When can we return? What is the long-tail strategy that we need to have to keep this market alive and keep this market growing?

“The NFL did an incredible job in creating a product in Europe via London, which was very smart. They nurtured this for about 10 years before they started breaking into new territories. But there is a very long-term strategy that now is very lucrative for them.

“I guess the question is for us, as a top global club, is which direction are we going? The U.S. is definitely one of those directions. And how are we going to leave a legacy behind that we can sustain for years to come, and not just tap in and tap out in a certain market? Because you do not want it that two years later, no one remembers.”

(Top photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Adam Crafton covers football for The Athletic. He previously wrote for the Daily Mail. In 2018, he was named the Young Sports Writer of the Year by the Sports' Journalist Association. His debut book,"From Guernica to Guardiola", charting the influence of Spaniards in English football, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2018. He is based in London.