La Liga Story: Beyond Barcelona and Real Madrid

Since 1997, La Liga is contested by 20 teams but still it couldn’t be called as competitive a league as the English Premier League (EPL). The reason is for the past 15 years, you will notice that only four teams were able to hold the league winning trophy. Barcelona and Real Madrid have together won 13 of them whereas Athletico Madrid and Valencia got hands to one silverware each. However, La Liga is working towards branding itself beyond Real Madrid and Barcelona. Unlike the previous seasons, since 2016-17, the league is seeing a lot more balanced distribution of La Liga tv and central sponsorship money among all the teams. It follows the equal “distribution model” set by premier league. Another major step taken by league as it looks to challenge the Premier League for global domination was its India expansion strategy. In a first time ever, a Clásico match had been moved to an afternoon schedule to make it easier for Asian fans to watch. It is even possible that regular season matches could be played in countries like the USA, Mexico, China, Japan and India. In its global tussle with the Premier League, this might be La Liga’s most important competitive advantage. Besides, Spanish soccer is trying to be more exciting by copying the NFL’s technology. It aims to increase its global viewership massively—which currently stands at somewhere between 150 million and 400 million, and technology plays a big part in creating new fans. One could see that La Liga is making efforts to be the dominant soccer league in the world where the quality gap between its top two teams and the rest can be further decreased.