NFL in London

I had forgotten about that. I feel bad for their fan.

 

I love that it is written "fan", as if they only have ONE!

And although it sucks the fact that the team will play seven games in Jax for four years in a row, the deal makes sense. It gives them money and exposure. It can be bad for the hardcore fan at first, but in the long run could mean the team stays in FL and returns to their former competitiveness.

 

There won't be any impact whatsoever.

 

Unfortunately they left two seats untarped because the fan wanted room to stretch out so the games are still blacked out.

 

MLS has shown that planting a sport in a foreign country takes decades, on top of millions playing the game. A permanent nfl team would start strong, but recede quickly enough. It would be the 3rd/4th biggest sport in London. That would be its place. That standing wouldnt translate on a national level, let alone a continental one.

The sport has no roots. Im surprised they are looking into a permanent solution.

 

It won't happen. Not in short time, at least...

 

Perhaps not. But even if a team came in in 2020, they would struggle long term, because there are no roots there.

I will say that nfl does need to find a way to expand. In the 21st century, if youre not expanding youre falling behind. Am football will face a struggle against soccer, basketball etc. Its a sport that has almost no roots outside this country and Canada.

What soccer has done around the world is astonishing. A pro team here and there is not the answer. It needs to be a full scale operation to have any hope of gaining traction 20-30 years down the line. I dont want to sound like those anti soccerites, but Am footballs future outside this country doesnt fill me with hope.

 

There isn't going to be a London team.

Starting to get tired of hearing this from the NFL execs and owners (Kraft).

 

Is there a reason why they talk about it? Cant be stadium leverage.

 

The NFL misses NFL Europe.

 

The NFL expanding to London would more than likely be a failure for a few reasons. One of them already mentioned in this thread is that the sport really has no roots there which leads to another reason. The team will be an expansion team in a city/country whose NFL fans already have a favorite team. It would be like if, and this is a gigantic impossible if, an EPL team was placed in NY. All of the EPL fans in NY probably have a favorite team so you would have to grow a whole new fanbase from uninterested poeple. As we see from the International Series games this fanbase stretches across the whole of the UK as well as Ireland and Europe; and they don't even fill up Wembley for a game once a year. Finding 40,000+ people within 2 hours of London or closer who are willing to purchase season tickets will be next to impossible. If the NFL goes anywhere south or north of the border will be the best bet as both Canada and Mexico actually have thousands of people and youths playing the game and are not a ridiculously long plane ride away from the closest team.

 

This will have zero impact on football/soccer in England, a large percentage of people that watch the Wembley game in England are Americans that live in the UK, a large percentage are European and there are evern Americans that travel over for the game. If the NFL puts a team in London it will be suicide unless the Americans that live in the UK go to all of the games. If they are serious about a UK based team (and I cant believe that most Americans themselves are very happy at the idea) they are going to have to start with the basics, ie getting the population interested, of course there will always be some fans of the sport the world over but as an English man living in England I can tell you that nobody here is interested, not because there is anything wrong with the sport but because it is such a vastly different sport to the established sports, we just dont understand it!Before the powers that be even entertain the idea they are going to have to look at increasing the media coverage of the game which doesnt appear on the news or in the newspapers at all, maybe then the English could learn the game and would then be able to appreciate it more, I am sure its a wonderful sport if you know it.

 

Unless you have some actual data to back that up, I'd say you are completely wrong.

I'm not a fan of the game, but I know people who are, and who love the chance to see a real game.

There's certainly a novelty factor in it, and I'm not sure it'd work so well for a whole season - especially if the team is bad - unless ticket prices were low, but crowds would still be good.

I think you are confusing your perception of the sport with everybody else's.

It's a niche sport. The 75,000 or so who watch live games on Sky are still dwarfed by the number who'd watch live coverage of Port Vale v Oxford in League Two, but people can go and watch a League Two match live any time they want. They can't see NFL teams live, so naturally, they jump at the chance. The big game location at Wembley also attracts a fair few in the same way that rugby club Saracens (average crowd about 9000) were able to pull 83000 when they played a game a Wembley last year.

The game does get some coverage in papers, although the columns tend to be small, and often sponsored. The Daily Mirror gives the game more coverage than most, although that's probably because their chief sportswriter is a big fan of American sports.

The big problem for the NFL, with regards to a franchise in England, is the drain on finances it'd be. Clearly, if you have potentially more fans in the stadium than watching on TV, the TV deal is not going to be great. The country would also produce no players, and the other owners might think that while it's a great deal for the fans of the game in the area, what exactly are they getting out of it?

 

It does sell out. Wembley's capacity is reduced for NFL games as around 5000 seats down the sides are covered over because they are too low to see over the players/coaches etc stading on the touchlines.

 

I can honestly say I have never met anybody English who has any interest, I am not trying to be argumentative, all I am saying is that the NFL should 'walk' before it tries to 'run'. I have no doubt that the game could have a healthy following in the UK if they tried to 'grow' the sport in the correct manner and for me I believe the first thing to do would be to get an understanding of the game to the majority of the population. I admit I have only 'heard on the grapevine' that a lot of the Wembley crowd arent English so I guess this might not be the case, it makes sense to me though that a single game in London would attract a lot of NFL supporters from accross the European continent as well as ex-pat Americans. If the NFL was to put a team in London as of right now I believe that it wouldnt work and the attendances would not be great and it will die, if however the NFL was to keep 'promoting' the sport and having 1 game a year along with educating the country on what the game is about then I think in the future it might have a chance - this of course is only my opinion.

 

I think this would be the best way to grow the sport short term, this will lead to an increase in the amount of NFL fans in the UK and eventually there would be enough interest to maybe even have a team, I just dont think there is enough interest to support a team right now. I also cant imagine fans in the US are over pleased at the thought of having a team the other side of the world? I've read up on this a little and I understand that there isnt a team in LA? If this is the case I think its scandalous to even think of putting a team overseas before putting a team into one of the USA's most populous cities?

 

It would be a scheduling nightmare to pull it off. No matter how you did it, until you can travel faster then we currently can via plane it would be a huge disadvantage to whatever team was traveling, be it the london based team to the states or the team from the states to london.

And it would be hard to get the players to go along with this also, not just with uprooting families but the practice squad players and rookies trying to make teams, thats a huge leap of faith on the players side.

 

The problem is that it's not something people are going to go round discussing too much. It's still probably going to be their 2nd or 3rd sport, and the lack of visibility of the game in the mainstream media means it's rarely going to crop up in conversation.

I had no idea a guy at work liked the sport until someone asked him what he did at the weekend, and he said he'd been to the NFL game at Wembley. The guy who asked him then expressed a degree of surprise, stating that he followed the game, said his favourite team etc.

Their fandom isn't going to be like supporting their football team, which is a pretty public thing. It'll be more like an interest, and be something you probably wouldn't know about unless you knew them pretty well.