You rarely have to listen to Javier Tebas for too long before it starts: the warnings, the calls for action, the urgency in the need for change.
His eternal subject? The Premier League.
President of the LFP, Tebas is a man with the Premier League always in his sights. Since his appointment in 2013, he's focused much of his work on tackling what he sees as a growing death star in England, becoming a man on a mission, imploring "the rest" to resist and to fight.
"If professional football doesn't react, the Premier League will be like the NBA," he said at a forum on Third Party Ownership last April.
What had prompted such a declaration was the Premier League's signing of a £5.14 billion TV rights deal only weeks earlier, and when he said "like the NBA," he didn't mean filled with T-shirt cannons and announcers demanding crowds to "MAKE SOME NOISE." Instead, he was predicting one gobble-up-everything league surrounded by countless others rendered irrelevant.
"We need investors, people that want to share their wealth, so that other leagues don't take talent from our clubs," Tebas added. "If that happens, we'll be as good as dead."
The talent that the head of La Liga was referring to in an immediate sense wasn't that which exists at Real Madrid and Barcelona. The likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Gareth Bale, Neymar, Karim Benzema and Luis Suarez are not the focus here.
Instead, it's the likes of Borja Baston who are.
This week, Swansea City are expected to complete a £15 million deal for the Atletico Madrid striker, per BBC Sport. "I think it is close. I think it is imminent," said Swansea manager Francesco Guidolin. "I was happy with the squad before but I am more happy now."
And so he should be.
In the hills of the Basque Country, Eibar's tiny Ipurua is not typically where you'd expect a striker to blossom, but that's where Baston developed, and Swansea will be getting a very competent forward because of it.
On loan from Atletico last season—his fifth consecutive loan stint since 2011—the 23-year-old tallied 18 goals to become the third most prolific Spaniard in the division and the fourth highest scorer in the league among players outside Real Madrid and Barcelona.
The impressive part, though, was the where. The how.
Eibar is the smallest club in La Liga by a distance, recorded the second lowest possession figure in the league, per WhoScored.com, and sat near the bottom for attempts on goal. That's not a striker's idyllic environment, but Baston made it work.
In a productive and complementary partnership with Sergi Enrich, and serviced by the excellent Keko, the man whom AS nicknamed "Van Baston" excelled with intelligence, composure, neat technique and efficiency. Indeed, his strengths lie in exacting trailing runs, a knack for arriving in the box at the right moment, one-touch finishing and quick reactions.
As a mix, it doesn't sound devastating, but it's mightily effective. And yet, Atletico were always likely to let him go elsewhere. At the Vicente Calderon, they had other priorities and other targets, but more importantly, Baston is not in the Diego Simeone mould; he's not fast, aggressive and direct.
For them, the returning striker was a man to cash in on, leveraging his youthful age and upward trajectory. With £15 million, Swansea have allowed them to do that—circumstances that, while not surprising, are indicative of the threat the Premier League and its rapidly growing financial strength poses to La Liga's "other" clubs.
In years prior, a player of Baston's ilk would likely have found his way to Valencia or Sevilla or Villarreal, a promising talent kept within Spain. But the never-ending pockets of the Premier League are changing that.
Last season, leagues such as Ligue 1, the Eredivisie, the Russian Premier League and the Ukrainian Premier League saw the impact of England's TV cash even before it officially arrived, as a wave of players swapped title-contending outfits around Europe for bottom-half clubs in the world's richest division.
La Liga didn't experience the same sort of losses then, but Baston's impending move shows it is now.
In the current market, £15 million might not sound like a lot for an emerging striker fresh off a breakout season, but let's give it some perspective: We're only a handful of years removed from when the Premier League's heavyweights—not its also-rans—were handing over that sort of fee for players; Arsenal spent £15 million to sign Santi Cazorla just four years ago; contenders for European honours in Sevilla and Villarreal have never spent £15 million on a player in their history.
But now that figure is within Swansea's reach.
Suddenly, then, the threat to La Liga's other 18 clubs has changed. It used to come from Real Madrid and Barcelona, but now it also comes from Premier League clubs scrapping for all of top-flight survival and mid-table safety—clubs that can outspend and overpower nearly every Spanish outfit outside the top two or three.
That's also been demonstrated by Middlesbrough's ability to loan Alvaro Negredo from Valencia. Admittedly, Los Che needed to slash their wage bill to comply with financial fair play regulations, but the deal itself remains striking.
After all, this is a newly promoted Premier League club occupying the same sort of financial space as an outfit with six Spanish titles and two Champions League final appearances.
So what is La Liga's answer?
At an organisational level, the league led by Tebas is on a drive to attempt to compete with the Premier League in international TV markets, reflected in this season's introduction of a 1 p.m. kick-off on Saturdays. Such a measure is only one in a large number of related moves, and it's also important to acknowledge that several clubs continue to react with savvy to the changing market dynamics.
One of La Liga's strong suits for some time has been recruitment, partially out of necessity. "The economic crisis made the clubs here utilise their capital better in selecting players," said Tebas last year. "The crisis taught Spanish football to work harder to find talent."
The LFP president's point was that wealth has made English clubs conservative, happy to wait for their Spanish counterparts to spot and develop talent first before moving in themselves.
There is evidence of that.
At Villarreal, an exciting, new-look squad is coming together this summer despite the losses of Eric Bailly to Manchester United and Denis Suarez to Barcelona. Roberto Soriano, Nicola Sansone, Alfred N'Diaye, Cristian Espinoza, Denis Cheryshev and Alexandre Pato have arrived at El Madrigal at a negligible net spend, while Sevilla have also reloaded impressively (and at a profit) after seeing Grzegorz Krychowiak and Kevin Gameiro depart to Paris Saint-Germain and Atletico, respectively.
And yet, therein lies the point: Losing stars and emerging talents to heavyweights is one thing; losing them to bottom-half Premier League teams is another entirely.
In Baston, La Liga has lost an exciting young striker to the Premier League. But more than that, he's indicative of the new, growing threat to Spain's "other" 18 clubs.
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