Football is the world’s most popular sport, but success and riches have been localised to Europe and South America for generations.

The majority of football tourism, too, centres around a handful of leagues and countries, with the Premier League dominating.

But will football’s powerhouses de-centralise away from traditional zones? Will we see national team and domestic might transfer into Africa, Asia or North America?

Or will leagues like the Premier League merely move abroad?

As part of the Future of Football project, we asked the magic eight ball three major questions about the globality of the game over the next two decades…

The eight ball says: Don’t count on it

“Football makes people dream. We have allowed children to dream. Children in Morocco and around the world dream of winning the World Cup.

“We have made a fantastic achievement but we want to do that again. If we can keep reaching the semi-final or quarter final regularly, one day we will win the World Cup.”

In the afterglow of Morocco’s remarkable run in Qatar, where they became the first African country to reach the World Cup semi-finals, head coach Walid Regragui was full of ambition and belief.

Three months later, that confidence was enhanced by a first-ever victory over five-time world champions Brazil in a friendly in Tangier in March 2023.

But what are the realistic chances of a team from outside of the established elite claiming World Cup glory in the coming decades?

History is not on Morocco’s side.

Each and every one of the 22 World Cups ever held have been won by a side from Europe or South America.

With teams from those continents dominating the top 10 of the current FIFA rankings, upsetting the world order remains a huge challenge.

Even within those federations, there is a hegemony which has proven difficult to break. Just eight countries have lifted the World Cup since it was established in 1930.

So where and how might a new power emerge?

Mega populations

When it comes to untapped potential, the mega populations of China and India seem an obvious place to start. With almost three billion people living in those two counties, the power of probability says there must be enough talent to discover and harness inside those borders to challenge on the world stage.

However, in both countries the football landscape is complex.

China’s substantial financial foray into football in the middle of the last decade sent shockwaves through the game, attracted star names to the Chinese Super League but always seemed too extreme to last – and so it proved. Perhaps that is a warning to the players heading to play in the Saudi Arabian league. With the political drive behind the China boom waning and even eight-time champions Guangzhou succumbing to financial crisis, the growth of the game has slowed.

There isn’t a single Chinese player in any of Europe’s top five leagues and the impact of the investment hasn’t translated to the international stage. Defeats to Vietnam and Oman were low points during their failure to qualify for the last World Cup, while they rank a lowly 81st in FIFA’s standings.

India are even worse off, down in 101st. Stephen Constantine, an Englishman who has managed the country twice and coached in the Indian Super League last season, explained to Sky Sports the wide-ranging issues preventing India from converting their huge population figure into a successful football system.

“We had the derby here in February, my team East Bengal against Mohun Bagan, and there were 60,000-70,000 fans,” he said. “I’ve been in a stadium where there have been 110,000 for that derby game. That shows the passion there is for football in India.

“Football is loved by many in this country but there are other external things which control things. The media, for example, the advertising – it all goes to the cricket.

“If I go back to when I first came here 20 years ago, more people are aware football is here. It has improved. The Indian Super League – the package, the production is excellent. Is the football excellent? No, it’s not at the level of the production.

“Why is that? Why don’t we have any Indian players playing abroad? Why aren’t we winning the AFC Champions League or Asian Cup? Because the players aren’t good enough. For me it’s all about coach education and we have not given the proper respect to coach education we should have done. Better coaches equals better players.

“The Indian player does not get the information at a young age, compared to a 15 or 16-year-old in Europe. There’s talent here for sure. Lots of talent but it’s one thing to have that talent, it’s the next thing to develop it and we’re not developing it at the moment.”

Constantine suggests there are also cultural reasons affecting the development of the game in India. Asked about the prospect of a player from the Indian Super League making it to the Premier League, his response is emphatic.

“He’s got no chance. It’s not going to happen. We have Indian players who are making very good money that they would never ever make if they went out of India.

“I was previously at Pathos FC. Why didn’t I bring a couple of the India players? There were one or two who could play there – but we’d only give them €3,000 a month when the kid is on €10,000 a month in India. Why is he going to go to Cyprus?

“The national team Indian players get a very good salary they would not make anywhere else. The clubs are overpaying for these Indian players because there aren’t many of them. The pool of quality Indian players is small.

“The family sense here is massive, too. You have 30-40 people in a family, living in the same building. When you’re making really good money you’re looking after quite a few people. The same issue is in Africa, looking after the extended families. That is another issue for the Indian player who thinks he might go to Thailand, for example. ‘I might as well stay here, at home with my family and everyone is happy’.”

With Constantine listing problems at the different levels of the game in India, the prospect of World Cup qualification – let alone a World Cup win – feels a long, long way off.

“I don’t see it,” he said, when asked about the country reaching a World Cup in the coming decades. “We barely qualified for the Asian Cup this time and all three games were held here in Calcutta against low-end opposition.

“If you’re not focusing on developing your coaches, developing young players… I believe the talent is here but if you don’t water the grass it’s not going to grow. It’s been a massive problem for India since I’ve been involved in 2000.

“I’ve been 23 years invested in football in this country and I’m a little frustrated that we’re not a little bit further ahead than we are. It pains me actually.”

Will the underdogs have their day?

Of course, size isn’t everything, as Morocco’s third-place play-off conquerors Croatia proved in Qatar. Impressively, it’s not the first time that country has overperformed given the context of its population of four million.

Even smaller, Iceland – with not even 400,000 inhabitants – have also punched above their weight in recent years, incredibly reaching the quarter-finals of Euro 2016, their first-ever major tournament, before qualifying for the World Cup for the first time in 2018.

So what could smaller nations, hoping to make their mark on the world stage, learn from those exploits?

Lars Lagerback – a key figure in that Icelandic improvement, taking charge in 2011 before leading the team in France alongside co-head coach Heimir Hallgrimsson – says a combination of good coaching from an early age, player exposure to high-quality foreign leagues, organisation on and off the pitch, and some good luck with a talented generation are all essential ingredients.

Once those elements are in place and qualification is achieved, the challenge of tournament football presents new problems. In that domain, experience is key, says Lagerback, who had taken Sweden to a country-record five major tournaments in a row before working for Iceland.

From finding a style to succeed against bigger sides to managing the training load while away at tournaments, teams treading a new path need guidance.

“It’s so different,” he says about coaching at a European Championships or World Cup.

“You have for the first time a little bit more time with the national team and it’s so easy if you haven’t been there and you haven’t got a lot of experience [to be] over-ambitious [in training], that you want to do too much.

“I would never underestimate experience both for the players but also for the whole staff. I think that’s really important – and it’s important for small countries to try to keep the experience or, if a coach or member of staff are stopping, they should try to translate that to the incoming [staff].”

Lagerback saw first hand how a turnaround in fortunes can transform the belief and momentum around a team. He describes how Iceland would play in front of just a couple of thousand spectators when he arrived but soon had 10 per cent of the country’s population vying for tickets as they found a way to win.

Their supporters – and their iconic ‘Viking Clap’ – added a new and unique feel to the 2016 Euros and 2018 World Cup. With FIFA expanding the 2026 World Cup to feature 48 teams, there will be a fresh and diverse spectacle in the stands across Canada, Mexico and the United States too.

But while there will be more opportunities for sides which have previously struggled to make it to major tournaments, the new, bigger format doesn’t necessarily play into their hands, argues Lagerback.

“I think that is a disadvantage for the small countries because you need many, many players,” he said. “You’re going to get tired players, injured players and when you’re playing in such a tight [schedule] with the matches you need a big squad. That is an advantage for the big countries.”

Africa’s potential

Lagerback’s journeys in international football also took him to a brief stint with Nigeria at the 2010 World Cup. It was ultimately an unsuccessful campaign but he was left with a lasting impression that the African nation could perhaps be the real sleeping power in the world’s game.

“In Nigeria they have such a great potential [when it] comes to players that if they get a little bit more organised, both around the team and inside the team, there you have a country with a huge potential to do well,” he said.

“It’s 12 years since I was in Nigeria but the players, they were really good.”

America’s game?

Perhaps the country which ticks all of these factors discussed above – population, an emerging talent pool, tournament experience and an increasingly organised, driven structure based around good coaching – is the USA.

With the States co-hosting the next World Cup, it’s no secret there has been added impetus in their desire to make sure they perform well at that tournament. And if it is a competition in which they can perform well and spring a few surprises, it could well be the launchpad and inspiration for greater things to come.

Cindy Parlow Cone, the president of US Soccer, is bullish about the potential for the current generation of players and what they could achieve in 2026.

“Our men’s national team is young and dynamic and so fun to watch and to see their growth leading up to the World Cup last year, throughout the World Cup, and then now, those players looking forward to 2026… I agree with all the studies. I haven’t done any studies on this and I might be a little biased, but I agree that our men’s team has the potential to make a run for the World Cup title here very soon.

“That World Cup is going to be the biggest event the world has ever seen and having the World Cup in our home country is really going to help with all of that [development] at every level.”

Parlow Cone outlined the hard groundwork which has already gone into developing the game in the States.

“Our sporting department as well as our professional leagues, our youth organisations and our development academy that US Soccer was running has really positively impacted the development and growth, both on the women’s side and on the men’s side. So we’re seeing the impact of the growth of the game in this country and more and more players playing out sport.”

It could be a winning formula – but World Cup history and structure remains on the side of the established elite.
Peter Smith

The eight ball says: Very doubtful

The 39th game debate has come and gone before – the idea of Premier League clubs playing an extra round of fixtures in a foreign country. The 2008 launch of the concept was met with some support, but largely opposition and the idea has been dormant for the past 15 years.

Quite simply, the Premier League’s massive spike in popularity since 2008 means the division does not need to play matches abroad, with Italy and Spain playing their equivalent of the Community Shield in Saudi Arabia in recent years. The Premier League’s current stance is that they have no plans to take games abroad.

Yet, enter the Premier League Summer Series: the largest export of England’s top-flight to a foreign country for pre-season action. Nearly a third of the Premier League clubs played multiple fixtures against each other in the United States earlier this summer in a move that looked, to many, like a dip in the ocean as to potential regular matches abroad.

This is not the first time the Premier League has put its name on a pre-season tournament. The Asia trophy took place on a bi-annual basis between 2003 and 2019 and then Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore said its success would spark similar tournaments taking place in other continents.

So why is the Premier League committing more energy – and teams – to pre-season tournaments abroad?

The Premier League has two main competitors in terms of audience, broadcast revenue and sponsorship: Formula One and Champions League.

However, according to former FA commercial director Phil Carling – now senior vice president at global sports agency Octagon – the Premier League has one disadvantage compared to those two tournaments. Premier League matches are played in one country, while F1 and Champions League games take place across the globe and over continents – so sponsors are more attracted to those tournaments.

“If the Premier League wants to make sure they have a proposition that is consistently better than Formula One and the Champions League – and keep on delivering audiences at scale and whilst activating in multiple different markets – they will have to look at where the games are played,” Carling tells Sky Sports.

“That’s why you have the Premier League Asia trophy and the Summer Series in the United States – it offers the clubs’ sponsors the opportunity to activate in a market other than the UK.”

So the pre-season tournaments help address the Premier League’s balance of a one-country league. The Premier League’s popularity in the United States has risen due to the accessibility of the NBC broadcast deal. The league’s viewership on NBC grew by 3 per cent in the 2022/23 season.

So, with America’s major sports such as football, baseball and basketball holding London matches in recent years, could it extend to ‘soccer’ league matches being played there in the wake of the Premier League Summer Series?

Well, the imminent introduction of an independent regulator by the UK government would make that difficult. The body would stop any breakaway league, similar to the European Super League launch in 2021 and individual matches away from the UK audience could be included in that bracket.

“I don’t see a situation where they are playing regular league matches in remote markets, like the NFL, NBA and the MLB do, for a while because you wouldn’t get the consensus and the government wouldn’t let you,” adds Carling.

“There might be more, and maybe even richer, tournaments that involve Premier League clubs and have a connection with the league. They could set up a sidebar that involved Premier League clubs and equities, with a competitive structure around it, to play it in the markets where the Premier League is strong. So that’s Asia, Asia Pacific, North America and potentially the Middle East.”

Carling, who was Arsenal’s first ever marketing director, says the Premier League “doesn’t need to go abroad” given how far ahead they are of the other European leagues. The likes of Spain and Italy need to play matches, such as their Super Cups, in countries such as Saudi Arabia to improve their commercial assets.

However, what nobody saw coming was the threat that Saudi have provided themselves in terms of a competitive league. Could it change the Premier League’s robust stance on playing abroad?

“It’s about what stresses come on the Premier League commercially over the next five years,” says Carling. “We are already seeing the Saudi League has earmarked 150 players on the market to come to their league. We assumed it would be players at the end of their careers, such as Karim Benzema and Luka Modric, but the fact they have Ruben Neves at 26 years old indicates this is a slightly different thing.

“The audience is going to follow the talent, so if the Premier League start to come under pressure because there is a major leakage of talent to another league, and it could be Saudi Arabia, then under those circumstances they would have to start looking at things that address the balance.

“At the moment, the Premier League are so far ahead and they have been juggling the ball quite nicely. They don’t have the motivation to go abroad.

“But talent follows money, eyeballs follow talent and money follows eyeballs…”
Sam Blitz

The eight ball says: Very doubtful

Those with an opinion of the half-and-half scarf are aptly divided somewhere down the middle.

For some it is an object of mockery; a symbol of a matchday experience totally alien to those who have observed the same pre and post-game practises with near-religious devotion through years of following their local team.

In many instances to humorously deride the half-and-half scarf is to pounce on the opportunity of scoring a relatively easy point on social media. But there is also a deeper reason for the disdain.

It is, some will say, the physical representation of a neutrality that is eating away at the partisan terrace culture which has been the driving force behind the global behemoth that is club football.

On the other half of the divide are those who keep the half-and-half scarf trade afloat not out of disregard for the game, but usually out of a desire to obtain a physical memento from an event that has been months, if not years, in the planning.

These fans have travelled further and at greater expense to get to the stadium. As the Premier League’s global audience has exploded so too has the influx of football tourists coming to the UK.

Between 2011 and 2019, the number of tourists per year who took in a live football match as part of their trip to the UK rose by 66 per cent, from 990,000 to 1.5m.

Football tourism is on the rapid ascent and, given the revenue it generates during typically off-peak months for the tourism sector, it is unlikely that any government will stand in its way.

Are we approaching a point where tourism fans, here defined as supporters who have travelled from outside the UK to attend the match, will fill the majority of seats at a Premier League ground?

Both from a simple numbers standpoint and a more nuanced breakdown of what may unfold in terms of football fandom in the next 20 years, such an outcome seems unlikely.

Last season the average capacity of a Premier League stadium was 40,596, and the total amount of seats available across all top-flight fixtures in 2022-23 was just north of 15.4m.

Even if we were to apply the 66 per cent growth we saw between 2011 and 2019 to the next 20 years – in itself far too rudimentary an equation on which to base any form of conclusion – the number of football tourists coming to the UK in 2043 would be 7m, still shy of half the Premier League seats available in one season

Football tourists are not divided equally across 20 top-flight clubs. Manchester United (226,000) and Liverpool (213,000) attracted by far the most in 2019.

Taking these numbers in isolation, across 2019 tourists accounted for roughly 16 per cent of the crowd at Old Trafford, and nearly 21 per cent at Anfield, both substantially higher than the league average of roughly 9 per cent.

Therefore based on the current trajectory, Man Utd and Liverpool would see the majority of their seats occupied by football tourists in 20 years.

The pulling power of an authentic experience

But these numbers are a hopelessly imperfect breakdown of what could happen. They take into account none of the global or cultural factors that are likely to play a far bigger role in determining the future of fandom.

Soaking up an authentic stadium experience is arguably as big an appeal as the match itself. The raucous atmosphere created inside the ground emanates primarily from large groups of local fans.

They themselves are a huge part of the matchday appeal. A vibrant Kop, for example, is one of the main reasons that Anfield ranks as one of the most popular destinations for tourism fans.

The fans themselves are aware of this, and of the power this gives them.

In response to a rise in ticket prices for next season, Liverpool FC Supporters Board told the club: “Support for your football team stems from loyalty and that loyalty is two way. Fans cannot switch allegiance from one club to another yet it is their pockets which are being hit.”

The concern already being sounded is that ticket rises, which are typically less off-putting to the more free-spending football tourists, will have a detrimental impact on the future of a club’s terrace culture.

Fulham Supporters’ Trust recently penned an open letter to owner Shahid Khan highlighting the concern.

“The high cost of tickets not only alienates many of the club’s long-term supporters,” they argued, “but also threatens to make it harder for the team to attract new fans and build a truly inclusive fan base.”

Clubs, and indeed governments, will continue to welcome tourism fans in their numbers as they are willing to spend far more money on a matchday than locals.

It is therefore within the interests of the clubs to maintain a strong affiliation with the local fans who contribute to the environment which in turn attracts tourism.

On that basis, the number of tourism fans will continue to rise, but it is unlikely that they will fill the majority of Premier League grounds by 2043.
Michael Morrow