JOHN NELMS has revealed Dundee are keen to resurrect their plans to take the SPFL Stateside.
The Dark Blues’ American bosses Tim Keyes and Nelms hatched a project to play Celtic in a Premiership game in Philadelphia in 2015.
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But their hopes of moving the SPFL across the Atlantic fell apart after local opposition saw Uefa and Fifa object.
Nine years on, Spanish football chiefs are close to agreeing a deal to play a La Liga fixture in Miami, with Barcelona and Real Madrid fully on board with the plan.
Dee CEO Nelms is watching events closely and would be eager to dust off the Scottish scheme if it was allowed.
He said: “Is it something we’d look at again? Yes, we’re open to all of these things.
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“We’re in the entertainment business so anything we can do to entertain, we’d certainly do that.
“That project nearly happened, it was very, very close.
“It would have been fantastic for everybody, financially for the football club, for the eyes that you’d get on the game, everything we thought that it would be fantastic for.
“The NFL are doing it just now. They were in Germany last weekend. They see the benefits in doing that.
“Now, with benefits also come the negative side of it, which is making sure your national identity and the league’s identity is there.
“In the United States, their concern was the Mexican league potentially playing a lot of their games because of the loopholes that we found and how we could make it happen.
“In the US, especially in the southern states, the following for Mexican football is huge.
“I think if you put the two games up against each other, an MLS game versus a Mexican league game, you’d have a big group of people that would choose the Mexican league game in certain states in the United States. I understand what the fears were.
“Then Canada said, ‘Right, let’s do it in Canada’. But the problem with Canada is during the time of year we play our games, it’s usually frozen up there.
“We weren’t willing to play this game on plastic. That killed that.”
Despite his optimism that such a game could go ahead, Nelms admits he understands the MLS clubs’ fears about opening their borders to foreign football.
And he concedes the SPFL would not be happy if the roles were reversed.
He added: “There are an enormous amount of hoops. It’s Fifa, it’s Uefa and the local leagues.
“But if it ever arose again that we’re able to do that, we have a little bit more of an understanding of how it works now and we’d certainly be up for something like that.
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“The question is how it would affect the MLS and I understand that.
“If we had English Premier League games being played up here, I think we’d be a bit concerned that our stadiums might be empty on a particular week because Manchester United are playing Man City at Hampden. So I understand it.”
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