U.S. Summer Of Soccer Hits New Level With Leagues Cup, Soccer Champions Tour

Are you ready for some football?

And no, we’re not talking American football, with large men wearing layers of pads and helmets and whacking each other at high velocity and bad intent. We’re talking the game that all the rest of the world calls football, featuring more human-sized humans using mostly their feet and not whacking each other quite as much, though perhaps still with bad intent.

And some of the best clubs in the world are hitting U.S. shores with gusto this week with a string of mid-summer exhibitions that should fulfill the in-person viewing needs of seemingly every soccer fan on the continent.

The Olympics have already started this week, at least for the men’s and women’s soccer preliminary games, with matches in Nice and Marseille already underway before the Games’ Friday night opening ceremonies in Paris.

But that’s a long ways from the United States, where beginning this weekend, top teams from the English Premier League, Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga will be playing in person in front of US audiences, as part of the DIRECTV Soccer Champions Tour, a string of “friendlies” in mostly East Coast stadiums.

Fans can also attend the Leagues Cup, some 77 matches around the country between the 47 teams of Major League Soccer and Mexico’s Liga MX
MX
in the next several days, or watch it all on the MLS Season Pass on Apple TV+.

Soccer Champions Tour teams include four-time EPL winner Manchester City, plus long-time power Chelsea, Italy’s AC Milan, and Spain’s traditional powers Real Madrid and Barcelona, in a series of six matches in venues from New York to Chicago to Orlando.

“When you get the chance to go see your favorite team come to town, it creates this level of excitement,” said Russell Wolff, managing director of Sixth Street, the sports-focused investment firm behind the Champions Tour. “We’re taking advantage of that technology shift that allowed kids to become real fans of clubs a long ways away that weren’t possible before.”

Wolff, who spent 26 years with ESPN as a top executive, including five as GM of ESPN+, said the live, in-person experience is crucial in connecting fans to a sport in a sustained way.

“Young kids who 20 years ago didn’t get to watch football, today those kids, my kids, can watch any European soccer match they want,” said Wolff, whose company’s holdings include the sports event-management giant Legends and Bay FC, the National Women’s Soccer League franchise in San Jose, Calif. “Your ability to watch almost anything creates fan avidity for these clubs.”

Ahead of the tour, Manchester City launched a retail pop-up store in New York’s Rockefeller Center that will remain open through Sept. 22, selling a range of Puma collections, part of the team’s North American charm offensive as it expands its following far beyond British shores, said City Football Group’s Chief Marketing Officer Nuria Tarre’.

“The U.S. is a very strategic market for us,” Tarre’ said. “Many European soccer clubs would say the same thing. The market is important and growing as a brand. (The Soccer Champions Tour is an) opportunity to engage US audiences in an authentic way locally. Normally, we do that through the year with virtual fan activities.”

Though Tarre’ said it was difficult to quantify the team’s U.S. growth, it’s seeing growing ratings on NBC and Peacock in the United States, improving U.S. retail sales of team merchandise, and stronger fan engagement on social media.

Importantly, all this is happening in a giant, wealthy market where fan attachments haven’t already been built up by decades of local affection and generational attachments.

“One in three fans haven’t picked a team,” said Tarre’. “There’s interest in the game, growth in the markets. The next three to four years, we really want to double down. It’s the same in China. When you look at one (uncommitted fan) in three, that’s a great opportunity, but also it’s more fluid fandom. We really see this as an opportunity to grow.”

Separately, 47 clubs in the U.S.-based Major League Soccer and Mexico’s top-tier Liga MX are taking each other on, in a total of 77 matches in stadiums across the United States and Canada, in what’s called the Leagues Cup.

Apple, with its unique 360-degree TV rights deal with MLS, is showing all the matches, and also sponsoring Partido Fest in Los Angeles, a live gathering in Downtown Los Angeles featuring video screens showing five of the matches, beginning with Atlanta United vs. DC United at 5 pm PDT and running through the LAFC vs. Tijuana matchup happening at 8 pm a few miles south at LAFC’s home stadium next to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

“It’s a really unique tournament, a bit like (golf’s) Ryder Cup: two nations, all the teams in a league play each other,” said Oliver Schusser, the Apple vice president who oversees key parts of the company’s mammoth Services unit, including sports, Apple TV+, Beats and music. “Most times you think of a league and you think of one or two top teams. We’re so excited in just a week we will have all the teams play each other.”

Schusser, following standard Apple practice, gave away no detailed viewership on the service, other than to say that year two of the company’s comprehensive deal with MLS that created the Season Pass is up in year two compared to its initial season.

“We’re seeing significant growth year over year, but our mission is we’re in this for the long haul,” said Schusser, a Munich-born German who remains an ardent fan of soccer in its many iterations who wakes before dawn to watch his beloved Bundesliga and watches many other leagues as well. “We’re investing. the league is investing, teams are investing. Nothing excites us more than delivering these things to fans.”

The Champions Tour is particularly tricky to work out, because many players on the five teams just finished a run with their national teams in the Euros, Copa America or other early-summer tournaments. To put it simply, teams can get worn out if their athletes aren’t handled with care. One change is holding this year’s matches mostly on the East Coast, rather than venues such as Houston, saving on travel time.

“The team that leads us day to day is putting together that mosaic of (venue) availability, practice schedules, ability to market on the ground, and make it a big event,” Wolff said. “Some of it has to do with their travel schedules, how far they want to go, building availability. We work hard to bring all that together.”

“Some might have said we were near Peak Soccer before some of these (summer tours),” Wolff said. “I think it’s a matter of calendar management. I think the binding constraint on all this is player rest. It’s not fan demand to watch great clubs in great buildings.”

The first year of the Champions Tour found strong interest in at least some matchups, Wolff said, pointing to the 82,000 who watched Real Madrid and Barcelona do a New World version of their El Classico La Liga matchups. This year, that U.S. matchup will be held at MetLife Stadium, a host site for the 2026 World Cup in North America.

Other matchups will be as much about history as matchups. Both AC Milan and Real Madrid are celebrating their 125th anniversaries and will face off in Baltimore celebrating that landmark.

Man City’s Tarre’ said the payoff for the team and the players themselves can be important. The City Football Group, Manchester City’s parent organization, has invested $800 million in a New York stadium for its MLS franchise, the New York City Football Club. The UK team will play Italy’s Serie A power AC Milan on Friday night in Yankee Stadium as part of the Champions Tour.

And though the regular season made an overseas trip “a tricky one,” Tarre’ said the U.S. games will give the team a chance to showcase its younger players and products of the team’s academy.

“This matters to them,” Tarre’ said. “It’s a great opportunity to see the young talent. That makes it slightly easier for those who will be joining us.”

And not to be left out, another big English Premier League team, Arsenal, will play three U.S. friendlies in the next several days, including one against Man City’s crosstown rival, Manchester United, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., and another Los Angeles-area matchup in the Carson, Calif., stadium where MLS team the LA Galaxy play.

Arsenal took a tiered approach to the return of its players from summer international play, with those whose national teams didn’t make it to the knockout round the first to return to the home club, while others who played deep into the summer won’t be joining until after the tour.