Manchester United played Portsmouth in a friendly in Nigeria last week, attracting 35,000 fans to a stadium that holds 60,000. Of those, 10,000 crashed into the stadium without paying, writes Lawrence Donegan. Despite this, the game is being touted as an example of the potential future success of the Premier League’s proposed global winter break mini-tournaments from 2011.
The tournament, the Tinapa Invitational Soccer Fiesta, lost money, so to see it as a template for the future of English football abroad “takes a rare kind of self-denial,” says Donegan, “just as it takes a dangerous self-belief to think the rest of the world is beside itself at the prospect of mid-season friendlies between Manchester United and Portsmouth, never mind Wigan and Hull City.”
As further proof that such a shambles is a bad omen, he cites the ill-fated Champions World Series in the U.S. earlier this decade. “Heralded as the future of soccer in the U.S., the series ended in ignominy as the company behind it went bankrupt. There were many reasons for this commercial failure, but the most serious was that those involved over-estimated the demand for meaningless games featuring European clubs.”