Javier Tebas: LaLiga Remains a Work in Progress
July 11, 2017
According to many objective measures, LaLiga is the best football league in the world. Our teams have the best players, the best coaches and the most passionate fans. The Champions League is dominated by Spanish teams and these same teams are invited to play in additional championships and friendlies around the globe.
This summer you can find LaLiga teams in places as diverse as Cincinnati, Ohio (Valencia), Regina, Canada (Valencia), Bandung, Indonesia (Espanyol), Dublin (Athletic Club), Duisburg, Germany (Malaga) and Osaka (Sevilla) as well as some of the world’s largest cities such as Miami, Tokyo and Munich.
I have many reasons to be proud of our achievements in the past years. Not in the least because the economic situation of our clubs today is dramatically better than just four years ago.
This has helped our league tremendously, especially in conjunction with the centralized sales of our broadcast rights, which we only started in 2015. Furthermore, the experience for the billions of viewers who enjoy LaLiga on TV has made giant leaps.
Take a look at the quality of our TV broadcasts last season and then go back to the 2015/2016 season. You’ll agree that there’s no comparison.
But all of this is not enough. We have many challenges ahead of us.
Our ambition is to not just be the best league in the world, we want to be the most-watched, most-beloved league in the world.
Last season more than 2.5 billion people watched LaLiga matches on TV, up from 2.1 billion the prior season. We want to further grow our audience and have people watch more of our programming. We also want fans to engage with us and our clubs more on digital platforms, during, after and in between matches.
To do that, we have to become a global entertainment company and get better at promoting LaLiga and our clubs internationally. This is what we’re focused on now, building our brand, advancing our digital capabilities and improving how we tell our story.
We’re investing a lot into this as LaLiga. Later this summer the league and our clubs will convene in a first-of-a-kind meeting to further enhance our efforts to make LaLiga not just the most popular league in Spain but in the world.
By Javier Tebas, LaLiga President
Do you want to share your views on LaLiga? Head over to our Community page to join the discussion!
