How an International Soccer Match Gets Made
It's wildly complicated. So here's an 8-step guide to scheduling your very own international friendly.
The United States men’s national team has two World Cup qualifiers this week and another one next week. Next month, it plays two more, the team’s 20th and 21st games of the calendar year. Next year, it already has six qualifiers on the schedule before the first quarter is out. And then, hopefully, there’s a World Cup in November and December, with a months-long buildup of camps and tune-up friendlies.
The women’s national team plays its final two games of the year later this month as well, taking its total tally for 2021 to 22 matches.
That’s 43 senior national team games this year alone, split between friendlies and tournaments like the CONCACAF Gold Cup, Nations League and qualifiers on the men’s side and the SheBelieves Cup and the Olympics on the women’s. As such, some of those games were arranged by the organizing committees of those tournaments, but the majority of them, including the all-important qualifiers, were put together by U.S. Soccer itself.
That process, of scheduling qualifiers or arranging friendlies, is fantastically complicated. But the work goes unseen. After more than a decade of covering both national teams, I had only a vague idea of how it worked. So I did this cool thing that reporters get to do: I asked the people at U.S. Soccer who do this stuff how they actually do it.
Here’s what I found out, broken down into an 8-step manual so that even you, reader, can organize your own international friendlies at home.
1. Check the calendar
You can’t schedule international games whenever you like. Or rather, you can, but clubs—who actually employ the players—are only obligated to release them during the official windows of the FIFA calendar. There is usually one window every month or two during the season, spanning a week or so, and then a long one during the summer. This creates a scarcity of possible game slots and, as such, the big national teams schedule their games a year or two in advance.
But within those set international windows, there are other events to steer clear of. Thanks to the USA’s polytheism in sports, you have to be careful not to accidentally counter-program a major event in some other sport.
2. Talk to “sporting”
U.S. Soccer then talks to its men’s and women’s teams’ respective general managers and head coaches, in consultation with the technical director. This is the “sporting” side of the federation. Together, they decide how often they would like to play and which of those games they would prefer to be home or away. Next, those requests are laid side-by-side with U.S. Soccer’s obligations to its broadcast rights-holders and what their schedules look like to air games—since there is some flexibility within FIFA windows.
A plan for an upcoming year begins to take shape.
3. Find opponents
Now begins the hard part.
The list of reputable and appropriate opponents available for a given slot is smaller than you think. Because soccer’s solution to any problem is more soccer, teams are tied up in more competitions than ever. Endless qualifying cycles and overlapping summer tournaments never left very many dates to play friendlies, but the Nations League—a newish, years-long intra-continental competition held in several different confederations—has only squeezed the calendar further.
Meanwhile, you don’t necessarily want to play the best or biggest teams you can. The selection of opponents requires some careful thought. Some days, you might want a challenge. On others, you might attempt to mimic a match with a future World Cup opponent, or to simulate a particular scenario. Or, on the eve of a major tournament, you may be more concerned with building up a team’s confidence. That reduces the pool of opponents even further.
U.S. Soccer’s managing director of administration, Tom King, primarily spends his days as a kind of soccer diplomat, maintaining relationships with his counterparts in every other federation around the world. Because it’s his job to find opponents, which means he is forever keeping track of all those other teams and what they’re up to.
“It’s kind of like a sales job because you’re prospecting all the time,” he says. “You’re trying to identify which teams are interested in coming, which teams are available, which teams can we afford their fees.”
King has worked for the federation since 1994 and is its emissary, making endless phone calls, sending lots of emails and WhatsApp messages, constantly talking, traveling to major soccer events—whether the U.S. plays in them or not—to see people. His contacts are crucial. They are the reason he has, during COVID, been able to swap in a new opponent with only a few weeks’ notice when a team had to drop of a game or tournament because of the pandemic.
Sometimes, he teams up with Mexico, which uses the U.S. as a lucrative quasi-home base for a lot of its friendlies. That way, the U.S. can offer opponents two games for their trouble and offer even more exposure to the deep-pocketed American market.
4. Talk to “commercial”
With a list of possible opponents and dates in hand, it’s time to go talk to Amy Hopfinger and her team. She’s the federation’s vice president for events and represents the commercial side. Because for all the sporting considerations, bills have to get paid. Games have to make money. U.S. Soccer may be a non-profit, but it has considerable expenses—$165 million in 2020—and a responsibility to the grassroots game to support it with programs and investment.
Commercial considers what the revenue proposition of a given game should be. What might ticket sales look like? That depends on the reputation of an opponent, but also on when the U.S. last played that team.
U.S. Soccer now has a figure to inform negotiations with an opponent over an appearance fee and covered expenses, as most big countries, the U.S. men included, command both.
“It is a business, at the end of the day,” Hopfinger says. “So there are commercial implications, whether it’s revenue, corporate partnerships or broadcast. All of that is factored in. And obviously preferences of the coaching staff.”
Some revenue isn’t made directly by U.S. Soccer. High-profile opponents create value for a sponsor and boost TV ratings and advertising income for broadcasters.
All those numbers have to be weighed against the sporting value of the potential opponents. When the World Cup, the climax of every 4-year cycle, is a long way off, the money side weighs heavily. Closer to a World Cup, when the stakes get bigger, the sporting side holds more sway.
“In a perfect world, we can address both,” King says. “Hopefully we’ve got a situation where the coach really wants me to target a specific team and that team would occupy a great slot on the broadcast calendar and tick a lot of boxes from the commercial standpoint and the technical standpoint.”
5. Pick a town
Unlike some countries, the U.S. doesn’t have a national stadium. It also doesn’t pick from just a handful of stadiums suitable for a national team game. There are dozens and dozens. And the size of our nation makes it hard on fans to attend every home game they would like to. So the matches have to be spread around, keeping regions where the fanbase is strong happy, while also bringing games to areas where an interest in soccer is still developing.
But the federation has to do all of that while negotiating the schedules of the main tenants of those stadiums, taking care not only to avoid conflicts but also to make sure that the turf will be in appropriate shape for soccer after a gridiron football game or a concert.
There are other factors to consider as well. The availability of training facilities. Weather. Altitude. Travel times and jetlag for the USA’s European-based players. Travel times between national team games in a longer window.
6. Go back to sporting
With the opponent picked and scheduled, the commercial side will come back to the sporting side with a few options for venues. There are really two kinds of home games—friendlies and qualifiers that must be won. For World Cup qualifiers, every edge counts, and the choice of town and stadium really matters.
The Americans could easily fill a dozen different NFL mega-stadiums for their home qualifier with Mexico but would lose homefield advantage in all of them, due to El Tri’s enormous fanbase stateside. So the trick is to find a smaller stadium where the U.S. might ensure a majority of fans.
“Qualifiers is really where we’re willing to pass on the revenue opportunities to make sure that we qualify and that put our teams in the best environment possible,” Hopfinger explains. “Whether that’s choosing a venue based on travel times—with players coming in from Europe or between games—or how we can ensure the most pro-American crowd possible.”
That’s why the men’s national team administration and coaching staff are closely involved in the final decision on venues for qualifiers. They are expected to win.
7. Negotiate the contracts and announce the game
Now for the legalese. That means negotiating appearance fees and travel budgets for the visiting team. Some major national teams, particularly in South America, outsource this work to promoters, who take a cut of the action and add an extra party to these discussions. They also need to work out which TV rights the guests will get—it’s become standard for the away team to get all of their local market rights for free—and which are controlled by U.S. Soccer.
Once the ink is dry on every countersignature, and not a second before, a press release from U.S. Soccer goes out. Now, most fans, not to mention journalists, hear about the newly-arranged game for the first time—although some opponents are a little quicker to get the word out. It’s been many months since the process was set in motion.
8. Check the wish list
After almost three decades, Tom King still has a few white whales to hunt. He’s brought most every major nation to the United States, but not all of them. And the prospect of the 2026 World Cup, mostly played on U.S. soil, will make it easier to draw some of the holdouts.
“I’ve got a list of teams on my desk that’s been there for years,” he says. “One that we haven’t hosted is France. We’ve hosted Italy, Spain, Germany, England, Belgium, Holland—we haven’t hosted France and it bothers me. It’s not that we don’t have a great relationship with the French federation, they’re fantastic. That will be a fun one if we can land that one as we host 2026.”
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