La Liga trying to rally support for match in USA

Villarreal USA is a bit of an anomaly, to be sure. For a start, I know many of our readers are not in the USA, and even within the USA we are more of an agglomeration of people spread over a big country than a typical Spanish “penya” or fan club that has regular meetings in the local bar with all sorts of hams hanging from the rafters and paella dinners. (Mind you, if we HAD a local bar with hams hanging from the rafters, I’d be there).

Anyhow, I was surprised to get a call from the La Liga office in the US this morning. I was asked if we were an “official penya” of Villarreal. I said more or less, because Villarreal doesn’t charge overseas groups to be part of their group of penyas. (That said, I honestly don’t know that Villarreal cares how official we are; they have been very helpful when people have contacted me and said they were planning a visit, and that’s really what matters). Anyway, when I could not provide a definite, answer, the call ended fairly abruptly.

Turns out the league is evidently feeling some pressure to mobilize official fans’ groups in the USA to support the idea of a regular-season match in the US (and as I wrote before, the selection of Girona-Barcelona has some other issues associated with it). They’ve asked American fan groups to sign a letter—in Spanish—in support of the match.

Fans in Spain have been almost uniformly against this idea (a good article about this is here, which also quotes one of my American buddies) although apparently there was a meeting of a group that brings together fan groups in Spain with Tebas which seems to suggest that there is some support for the match in Spain.

I doubt Villarreal (the front office/club) will take a stand one way or the other; I d know from twitter that the more vocal Villarreal supporters in Spain mostly think this is a bad idea in general. I posted an article last week about the political ramifications, too. What do you guys think?

Specifically, what do you think about this Girona-Barcelona match, and what would you think if say a Villarreal home match against Barcelona suddenly got moved to the USA?