Burning up the planet: the rise-and-rise of long-haul summer friendlies by major clubs

"Pre-season tours in distant locations are a growing problem — for both the planet and exhausted players ... long-haul flights are among the most polluting forms of travel."

Pre-season was once an opportunity for football fans to amble along to low-key games to run the rule over their club’s new signings, but a lot has changed since the advent of tbe Premier League in 1992.

In the summer before the Premier League kicked off, more than half the games played by the competition’s inaugural members were in England against other English sides. Visits to the UK by European clubs are now ubiquitous as the next season looms, but in 1992, only four clubs – Everton, Leeds, Norwich and Nottingham Forest – played games at home against overseas sides and only Crystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday travelled outside Europe, both visiting South Africa.

Since then, the commercial juggernaut that is the Premier League has been travelling all over the world in pre-season. Over the last decade, Premier League clubs have visited 13 countries outside Europe in pre-season, from Australia to Japan and Thailand and other locations, but the focus is strongest on one country.

With next year’s World Cup taking place mainly in the USA, half the Premier League clubs visited the country in the 2024 pre-season. This summer, five Premier League sides – Aston Villa, AFC Bournemouth, Everton, Manchester United and West Ham - are visiting the USA and that number could have been higher had Chelsea and Manchester City Premier not been playing in the country anyway in FIFA’s new Club World Cup.

Other clubs such as Arsenal, Newcastle and Liverpool are jetting off in the opposite direction on tours driven by commercial departments looking for more fans and sponsorship deals in a drive that must exasperate their fellow employees often making valiant efforts to reduce their club’s carbon footprints.

Freddie Daley of Cool Down - the sport for climate action network - says: "Pre-season tours in distant locations are a growing problem — for both the planet and exhausted players - and it is Premier League clubs leading the charge.

“The long-haul flights required are among the most polluting forms of travel, and these games pile pressure on top of already packed fixture schedules. For clubs claiming to care about sustainability, these tours are a glaring contradiction. It’s time for football’s leaders to stop talking and start acting - governing bodies need to intervene before player welfare and the climate pay the price."

Regional differences

A new TV deal is taking Premier League action to 48 countries in Africa, yet over the last decade, only one club has visited the continent with Everton’s visits to Tanzania in 2017 and Kenya two years later coinciding with a major sponsorship deal with African bookmaker Sportpesa, which had operations in both countries.

Research for Sporting Intelligence shows that 21% of all Premier League pre-season games over the last decade are outside of Europe, which is more than double the proportion of non-European games at the next biggest travelling league, Spain’s La Liga.

The figures in the table below are the cumulative totals of friendlies by clubs in those leagues in the 10 years to summer 2024.

While the Premier League’s long-haul travelling increases, matches played outside Europe by Serie A clubs have tailed off with as many games – 13 – in the last five years as in the final season before the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020.

French clubs often stage training camps in other parts of their own country. Even when venturing abroad in pre-season, Ligue 1 clubs typically stay in Europe with one exception. Last summer, only Rennes ventured outside of Europe, playing four games in Japan, but PSG is typically the only French club to jet off to destinations outside Europe, visiting Japan, South Korea and the USA since 2015.

Research for Sporting Intelligence shows that over the last decade 60% of all pre-season games played by Ligue 1 clubs outside of Europe involved PSG.

In Germany, more Bundesliga sides venture outside of Europe but 38% of all pre-season games played outside of Europe over the last decade have been by Bayern Munich, whose destinations have included China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and regular trips to the USA.

German clubs often travel the short distance across the border to Austria, where clubs from across Europe often congregate. Austria offers clubs myriad different opponents without the travelling and is increasingly an opportunity for Middle Eastern clubs from Qatar and particularly Saudi Arabia to engage with European clubs.

Austrian clubs also benefit from the country’s huge training camp industry, but when Europe’s elite travel overseas this is rarely to play local clubs. These are often money-spinning games against sides from their own leagues or other major European leagues in tournaments packaged around a sponsor. The matches are often notable for high ticket prices, regular substitutions and a dearth of yellow and red cards.

Some pre-season tournaments have cultural importance such as the annual Euskal Txapela between Spanish sides from the Basque Country, or Seville’s Antonio Puerta Trophy staged every summer since 2008 in the name of the Spanish player of the same name who died aged 22 of a heart problem in the club’s first fixture of the 2007/08 season.

Others are simply friendlies packaged up under the name of a sponsor to try and generate some legitimacy for matches marked by multiple substitutions and a dearth of yellow and red cards.

Who remembers the Audi Football Summit, the Casinò Lugano Cup, the Telekom Cup or the Visit Malta Cup, which is staged not on the Mediterranean Island but in London?

Top 10 Offenders

Manchester City has won many titles over the last decades but may not want the one for playing the least games at home over that period. City have only played full pre-season games at home in two of the last 10 seasons and not since 2021.

The figures in the table below are the cumulative totals by the clubs included in the 10 years to summer 2024.

City are far from alone in deserting their domestic fans in pre-season. Only once in the last 10 pre-seasons have Chelsea played more than a single game at home. Just six of 43 pre-season games played by Real Madrid over the last decade have been in Spain and just four against other Spanish sides.

In contrast, Inter Milan have not journeyed outside Europe in preseason since 2019, with Italian clubs preferring mid-season to jet across the world.

With commercial battles for fans and sponsors across the world only likely to hot up, these figures, which would all have been worse because clubs barely went anywhere during the 2020 and 2021 preseason due to the Covid-19 pandemic, are set to get worse.

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Steve Menary is the author of A Friendly Business? A critical evaluation of the globalisation and commercialisaton of the preseason friendly (CIES, 2019).