La Liga North America CEO Boris Gartner: "Change is not easy."La Liga
La Liga North America CEO Boris Gartner is confident in the league's future in the United States, even if it is unable to hold a match in Miami in January. A statement released by La Liga on Monday in response to Barcelona saying it is no longer open to the game indicated no matches will take place on U.S. soil during the ongoing season. Gartner said during a recent interview at his office in N.Y. -- before Monday's news -- that he and his colleagues knew holding a regular-season game in the States would be a challenge.
"Change is not easy," Gartner said. "Every time you see someone trying to do things different, there are strong opinions about it. We knew it was not going to be an easy process. We knew that there were many stakeholders that needed to be satisfied. ... We talked informally with all of them before actually getting into this, and the feedback that we got was, 'Let's follow the process and see where we get.'"
Gartner, however, remains optimistic that the league will eventually be able to hold games outside Spain, and that holding matches abroad will help La Liga flourish internationally. He pointed out the success the NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA have all had with int'l games.
"If you look at how that happened when [the NFL] started doing it, they faced resistance: 'Why are you taking it away?'" he said. "Seeing what happened, and knowing how it worked out [for the NFL], that's why we're very confident that it's the right thing to do. It will only help grow the sport, it will only help with the fans. If you want to try to limit the growth to protect how the game has been played for I don't know how many years, I think it's shortsighted."
'THE RIGHT PARTNER': Gartner stressed that a U.S. match is just one of five pillars of La Liga's growth strategy for the continent. The other four are TV and media rights; content strategy, "heavily relying on social and digital;" youth development; and grassroots- and community-based events in five cities: L.A., Chicago, Houston and Dallas, with a fifth to be determined.
He is currently leading a dedicated team of seven that is working on the Spanish league's North American growth, with plans to add one more employee by the end of the year. Gartner, who joined La Liga North America in August, believes La Liga's 15-year joint venture with Relevent will give it a better chance to blossom in a market it has been studying since it opened its N.Y. office in '16.
"There's a huge opportunity, but we need to make a concerted, serious effort with the right investment and with the right partner," he said of Relevent. "For us who have lived here for all our lives or the bulk of it, we know the market well. But for someone that's from the other side of the ocean, this might be a little bit confusing. What Relevent brings to the table is that deep knowledge of the market, the track record of having successfully started a tournament here with the ICC and built a soccer operation that has been successful."
STRIKING A BALANCE: One key for an int'l league looking to gain U.S. fans is having games air on a prominent network. The NBC's coverage of the Premier League is often credited as a major reason for the English league's popularity in North America. La Liga's ongoing partnership with beIN Sports, which expires in '20, offers limited U.S. distribution compared to the EPL's deal with NBC and the Bundesliga's deal with Fox, especially in light of recent carriage issues.
"We are certainly aware of the challenges that we have with distribution and the recent carriage disputes," Gartner said. "Our position is, we certainly hope that gets solved one way or another. We understand very well that having a good and easy accessibility to the matches is paramount for the success of La Liga, so we'll keep on working on that. We're not looking at [the partnership with beIN] as, when is the deal done? We're just constantly evaluating to see how we complement it. Between now and the end of the existing deal, how can we complement that with a strong and aggressive digital and social content strategy."
He added that there is a balance "between the reach and the distribution and the value that you can get for those rights."
Gartner: "You can probably go to one extreme and say, 'I can get a ton of money from some of the emerging players with very little distribution,' or get a lot less money with broad distribution. It's somewhere in the middle."
