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By Jason Davis in la liga —

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The actual image attached to a PR email about the Miami game before it was cancelled that I added "Event Cancelled" to because...it got cancelled.

The Eagle is back. I needed a week to do some pretty intense video editing (I mean intense for me, since I'm by no means an expert) on something we produced for Morning Kickaround. If you're interested, have watch of our item on the big questions still up in the air around the USL's plans to launch a first division league and institute pro/rel between three different division of professional soccer.

A video I made!

If you're not up to speed on Morning Kickaround, please give us a look. What started out as a thing to fill my mornings before the afternoon radio shift with American soccer treasure Eric Boswell Wynalda is now an American-centric outlet with a distinct lower division flavor. While MLS is still very much my jam and I'm always going to be a USMNT-first kind of dude, there are so many cool stories in the second, third, and fourth divisions of American soccer I feel compelled to tell them.

MK is becoming what I always imagined The United States of Soccer (R.I.P.) could be at its best: A place for clubs outside of the big markets to tell their stories on a national platform. I'm never going to be mad at MLS for doing what was necessary to make that league a successful big money product played in fancy new soccer stadiums, but I believe the real potential of soccer in America won't be met until there's a glut of professional teams playing at various levels across the breadth of the country.

If MK can help those teams get a little more pub and have a slighter better chance of surviving over the long term, that's the dream.

As we say on the show: #DotTheMap

And now for something completely different.

By now you've probably heard that the La Liga match planned for Miami between Villarreal and Barcelona—a game that was set to break one of the major taboos of club football around the world—was called off.

The promoter of the game and the company that took US Soccer to court over the governing body's refusal to sanction a foreign league game in the United States, Relevent, announced there is "insufficient time" to properly produce the game because of "uncertainty in Spain".

That might be about the player protest of the proposed game, or about legal questions popping up in España. I also imagine it might be difficult to secure the insurance policies needed to pull off an event like that if there are still massive questions swirling around the legality or the participation of the players.

Whatever the reasons, Relevent backing out meant La Liga couldn't move forward despite getting the reluctant go-ahead from UEFA. La Liga president Javier Tebas is extremely unhappy and wasn't shy in expressing how bad this is for Spanish football's ability to compete commercially with the likes of the Premier League.

"Today, Spanish football has lost an opportunity to advance, project itself globally, and strengthen its future.
"The defence of 'tradition' is invoked from a narrow-minded and provincial perspective, while the true traditions of European football are threatened by decisions by the governing institutions, which year after year destroy national leagues, the true driving force of the European football industry, amid the naivety and passivity of European leaders who fail to distinguish the inconsequential from the essential.

Damn, Javier. Tell us how you really feel.

"The 'integrity of the competition' is invoked by those who have been questioning that same integrity for years, pressuring referees and leaders, constructing distorted narratives, or using political and media pressure as a sporting tool.
"I want to thank Villarreal CF and FC Barcelona for their commitment and generosity in being part of a project that only sought the growth of our competition. They weren't thinking about themselves, they were thinking about everyone.

That's Real Madrid getting subtweeted in the part about the "integrity of the competition", which should come as no surprise to anyone that has paid attention Spanish football's weekly public drama. Real Madrid complains about everything and the Miami game was no exception. Madrid's beef mostly came down to the competitive advantage they believed (probably rightly) Barcelona would gain from playing in front of a big pro-Barca crowd in Miami instead of a pro-Villarreal one in Villarreal.

I'm feeling very this meme about Real Madrid's position on the Miami game:

More Tebas:

"LaLiga will continue working, with rigour and conviction, to keep Spanish football competitive, standing up to those who seek to destroy it, but always respecting its roots and ensuring its sustainability.
"Spanish football deserves to look to the future with ambition, not fear. We will keep trying. This time, we came very close."

Nobody plays the victim card like Spanish football executives play the victim card.

And if you're unconvinced that it was Madrid Tebas was taking shots at in the statement sent out after the cancellation, here's video of him aiming directly at Real Madrid and Thibaut Courtois after an economic conference in Spain.

Villarreal might be the most aggrieved party here, as this was a home game the club was willing to give up in a bid to get a toehold in the American market. The Yellow Submarine is like so many other clubs not already established among the European elite—desperate to improve the business by any means necessary.

It didn't help that the news broke at halftime of Villarreal's Champions League match in Spain on Tuesday. The club's president was caught on camera—complete with cigarette dangling from his mouth—getting the news on his phone.

So. This is a black eye for Relevent, a black eye for La Liga, and blow to the dreams Villarreal had of growing behind the notable youth academy brand presence it has in North America.

If you're looking for more background on how this all blew up in Tebas's face, Sid Lowe is a must-read.

Can't say I'm too broken up about it.

Everywhere I can say it, I do say it. Taking league games out of a league's home country is a terrible idea that betrays everything the sport is supposed to be about. All team spectator sports, but especially soccer, were born out of an innate human desire to join, and when that instinct is channeled towards the relative benign activity of organized athletic competition, it can be a beautiful thing. The root, the very foundation of soccer and the key to it appeal, is the way it combines the physical efforts of men engaged in a common cause with a point of common identity for those who watch.

Even if we have moved beyond location as the primary driver of fandom because, well, TV and the internet exist, the clubs we care about are inextricably tied to the history they made in the cities they inhabit. At the risk of falling into a slippery slope fallacy, it doesn't seem like a good idea to separate a club from that history.

I have no doubt that La Liga, Villarreal, et al, believe that this is a necessary evil and there's just no other way. I also have no doubt that no matter the roadblocks that ended this effort (or could kill off the Serie A match in Australia), dislocated league matches can and will happen.

My view is when we choose to attach ourselves to clubs that play far away from where we live, we accept that the only way to see our team play a meaningful game is to make the pilgrimage. That's part of the romance. While I feel for fans who might never have the financial means to make a trip to Spain to watch the Blaugrauna roll out its best eleven players in a contest for domestic or continental glory, I can't understand how any Barcelona fan could imagine watching the club play Villarreal in an NFL stadium in South Florida could hold a candle to seeing them play on their own hallowed ground.

But there's something else at work for me when it comes to the Miami match—the issue of American soccer's growth and the impact the constant presence of foreign leagues in the American market has one what we're trying to do here.

American soccer fumbled its chance to incubate in isolation the way most of the world's great soccer cultures did. When the early efforts at professional leagues crashed and burned in the first half of the 20th century, our chance to be like Italy, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, etc., etc. crashed and burned with them. We chose to make other games the center of our sports culture (something I'm not mad at, to be clear) and fell behind the rest of the soccer world.

And while I know we can't get that time back and the gates are already open for every league and club (and country...shout out, Mexico) to make our growing soccer appetite into their cash delivery system, the idea of foreign leagues playing official matches here feels different. I know, we're a giant, diverse, and generally wealthy country that should be able to have a thriving professional soccer ecosystem that captures the attention of more soccer fans every year even with the constant intrusion of soccer by soccer cocerns based abroad.

But why should the United States not be afforded the same protection from those intrusions that a country like Spain would no doubt demand for itself? Why should circumstance—we're rich, diverse, and from a business perspective, willing—mean American soccer is forced to compete in its own territory with other leagues when almost every other country on the planet is left alone by the machinations of foreign football executives?

I guess I chafe at the haute monde of European soccer mining America for resources while at the same time turning its nose up at our efforts to make the game our own. That feels like colonization.

When I mentioned that American soccer missed the opportunity to grow in isolation when our early professional leagues died, it wasn't the stunted development of the American player or our playing philosophy that I was lamenting. It was how that missed opportunity, and our subsequent later start cobelling together an American soccer identity, meant we never trusted ourselves to do the game our way.

La Liga coming to America in December probably woudln't have made much of a difference in the already uphill battle the domestic version of professional soccer is fighting. The best versions of the sport appear on our televisions, tablets, and phones whenever we want them. What could an official La Liga match in Miami do that the digital age hasn't already?

It's the principle of the thing. This isn't the NFL or the NBA, leagues with no real competiton for supremacy and that play sports with none of or only a fraction of the reach of soccer worldwide. Taking an NFL game to London is of a different species from La Liga going to Miami.

As I said, I know it's coming. I know some may welcome it. Maybe there's even an argument that La Liga (and other the other leagues who will follow) playing in the United States somehow helps our efforts to play the game at the highest level. If you think you can sell me on foreign league matches on American soil as a step on the way to a USMNT World Cup title, I'm all ears.

Until then, "cancelled" is fine by me.

Throw-ins to finish...

Jeff Rueter is doing a newsletter. That's good news and you should subscribe.

The Best Soccer Show this week was a listener Q&A and me blind ranking American soccer stadiums of note.

The newest American soccer badge belongs to Fort Wayne FC, a club born into USL League Two that is moving up to USL League One next year. I don't hate it.

This is a sentence that could only exist in American soccer: Sharktopus FC won its appeal for a replay in the U.S. Open Cup.

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