After protests
Football league cancels controversial project
12/22/2025 – 11:01 p.mReading time: 2 minutes
There was a lot of criticism of the plans. Now the scheduling of a Serie A game in Australia has been canceled.
The planned staging of the Serie A game between AC Milan and Como 1907 in Australia has fallen through. The Italian football league and the government of the state of Western Australia announced this after some heavy criticism. “Plans for Perth to host the first European league game outside its borders have been canceled,” they said in a joint statement.
The game should have taken place on February 8th. The organizers cited “financial risks, difficult approval conditions and last-minute complications beyond their own control” as reasons for the cancellation.
The Asian continental association AFC also contributed to the cancellation with new demands. “Due to further unacceptable demands from the AFC in the last few hours, it has become impossible to play the game in Perth,” said Serie A boss Ezio Simonelli.
The match was originally scheduled to be played in Perth because Milan’s San Siro Stadium is hosting the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics on February 10. The plan was controversial from the start. “Games from domestic leagues must not be exported abroad,” the fan organization Football Supporters Europe (FSE) recently demanded.
The cancellation comes two months after the failure of a similar project in Spain, where the league canceled an FC Barcelona game against Villarreal FC in Miami.
There was strong criticism of the first game of a European league abroad. The European Football Union (Uefa) only agreed to the plan “reluctantly” and “as an exception”. The heads of the German Football League (DFL) have confirmed that such a step is out of the question for the Bundesliga.