With a World Cup on the horizon in 2026, having bought the three-year broadcast rights for the Premier League for close on £2bn, a fan base that is growing rapidly and with a flood of capital entering into the European market, the US and football are finally aligning it seems.
For decades the strategy to tap into the sports-mad nation of 332 million people, where both passionate fandom and disposable income exists has fallen flat, the challenge of overcoming the domestic sports of American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey proving a mountain too big for ‘soccer’ to scale.
For a long time Major League Soccer (MLS) was seen as something of a poor relation when it sat next to the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB. Interest ebbed and flowed but it remained something of a retirement home for top players, something borne from the strategy down the years of trying to attract eyeballs on a sport that was struggling to find room at the table.
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Things are starting to change quite dramatically, though, with the MLS managing to ink a 10-year $2.5bn deal with streaming giant Apple, where games will be shown on the company’s Apple TV+ platform. It is a move that gives the MLS security and scope for further growth.
But while growing the domestic game is what the US wants to achieve, the premium product is what fans want to consume and the Premier League’s positioning at the top of that tree means that it commands the biggest football rights and is where football fans in America are looking towards when it comes to attaching themselves to the sport.
For Liverpool, like every other major European football club, the American market is one that they have major plans to try and expand in, with the club eyeing a potential physical retail store in the US in the future.
What Liverpool, who have part of their commercial and partnerships team based in New York, does commercially plays a huge role in the business model of the Reds, who have had US owners in the form of Fenway Sports Group for almost 13 years.
In order to keep growing the club on the field there has to be continued growth off it, something that was achieved commercially in the most recently published set of accounts for the year ending May 2022, where the Reds saw a £29m rise in commercial revenues to take the club to a sum of £247m. That will likely grow further when the club announce their 2022/23 figures early next year due to the sponsorship renewals of both Standard Chartered and Expedia.
Part of that continued growth hinges on making the most of the opportunities that exist in the US, where the club’s relationship with kit supplier Nike has seen them attempt to try and tap into a new audience by leveraging the simpatico relationship between Nike, Liverpool and basketball icon LeBron James.
Liverpool commercial director Ben Latty, speaking to the ECHO said: “We have a strong team out in the US. It’s a huge market for us, a huge growth market. I think we have proven that there is a lot of potential out in the market from a commercial partnership perspective.
“It is also a big market as a retail business. It is a fast growing market. It is also one of the largest markets for us in terms of our digital growth plan so it is a market that we are putting a huge focus on. But it isn’t just about how we gain a presence out there, it’s about how we build our profile and our cultural relevance and I think that is one of the things that you would have seen with our Nike partnership that we started doing with LeBron and the collaborations that we have done with Converse.
“We want to increase our presence and profile out there but also become culturally relevant. It is a market where we are looking at doing more in, and more than we have historically done.”
Liverpool likely won’t be heading out to the US this summer for their pre-season tour and look set to make another trip to Asia, as they did last year with a pre-season in Thailand and Singapore.
With the World Cup likely to see interest ramp up from next year in the run up to the competition, it is more likely that the Reds time their visit across the Atlantic to maximise the opportunity that it gives them.
While there is a big push to crack the US market and make the club the number one brand, the focus on other markets has not diminished, with the club also planning further expansion into territories where they are already hugely popular.
Latty said: “We’re not ignoring other markets around the world. South East Asia is still the biggest market for us. It is about what you do, when, and where.
“What you do in South East Asia would be different to what you would do in China, and what you do in China would be completely different than what you would do in the US. We have to assess what value what we do is to the fans but also to our commercial partners out there.”
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