I was just going by what I heard on a few shows I listen to but never looked it up. They said it looked to be about 15-20k short of capacity. Do you think there is enough support though from people within easy commuting distance to purchase enough season tickets? For the one off games I can imagine thousands of people traveling hundreds of miles but would they do so 8 times a year, 10 if you include preseason.
It does make sense though, soccer had roots in this country. People had been playing it here for 3-4 decades.
84004 was apparently the official attendance. I really can't imagine that many buying season tickets, especially to support an expansion team who'll take a while to be competitive. Wembley is not a cheap place to hire, which is one reason why ticket prices were £50 - £150 each. I do think the team would get very good crowds, in the first year at least, but it's asking a lot for people to make the journey and pay those prices 8 times. The "novelty factor" fan isn't going to go to eight games. You also have to ask if the players would be happy to be shipped off to England, paying higher tax rates and adapting to a different culture, having to make two transatlantic flights every week. The one thing that could be appealing though would be the anonymity. They could walk the streets, on the most part, without being recognised.
International expansion team 1 Game in London 1 Game in Berlin 1 Game in Tokyo 1 Game in Shanghai (or somewhere in China) 1 Game is Mexico city 1 Game in LA 2 More games where?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_football_teams_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAFA_National_Leagues i would say there is some roots...... http://www.bafanl.co.uk/standings/2012/adult
The b A better question is how it would impact rugby since that's the sport it was most directly derived from and is most closely related to. And no, it won't displace rugby any more than rugby will displace American football here; or American football will displace Canadian football; or Canadian football will displace Aussie football. There's a reason we all developed our own codes of violence. Soccer transcends however.
Even East LA? I just ran out of International cities that I knew would support NFL games, but you are right, what other 3 cities outside the USA could do it? Maybe Monterrey Mexico?
Well there's a week between games. If there was an NFL team in London I would say the Thursday night game on NFL Network shouldn't ever include the London team unless both teams were off the previous week. The London team would presumably be in a division with east coast teams so it would have at most 5 (possibly something like 2) out of 16 games in a time zone other than London and USA Eastern. My favorite NFL team, the New York Giants, had/will have 17 (4.25 per season) of their 64 regular season games from 2009 to 2012 be in a time zone west of USA Eastern.
I think the endeavor would make money even if the stadium was empty. The key to this is an excuse to air games at 10 AM Eastern which gives the NFL network partners a whole new block of advertising time to sell.
The only way for American football to be successful outside of US is to remove capitali$m. Too bad, if you remove capitalism, then it is no longer called American football.
It's called American football because of the rules of the game. I don't feel like an arguing about franchises and all of that.
I don't think being derived from rugby would make any difference. The two are wildly different now, and would just be seen as an entirely different sport.
My point is that that makes a better point of contention than thinking that it might displace soccer. At least rugby fans and American football fans go to games expecting roughly similar points of entertainment. Soccer fans and American football fans may overlap, but you go to games looking for entirely different aspects of entertainment. So look to the context of what I said. This comparison make more sense than the other comparison.
Our football is very slow and deliberate game and can seem over complicated to someone who hasn't grown up with it on their TV their entire life. It's easy to watch, because everything happens in a systematic fashion, but when it comes to playbooks and the rest, it becomes complex, probably a bit overwhelming. Think about how many times you tried explaining it to Americans who never payed attention to the sport. I've had a hell of a time explaining the game to people outside of the US, Canada and Mexico. Plus, if I can't take all the commercials, I'm not sure how people in England would be able to deal with them. Maybe NFL spends time explaining the game during the breaks, or at least I hope they would do so, and not show 1000 budweiser commercials.
I'd be surprised if there's any huge correlation between NFL fans and people who like rugby. I really don't see it as displacing fans at all. There'd be no need to ditch rugby, or any sport, for an NFL team in London. There are far more than enough people in the area for even 85,000 people to watch an NFL team without it having any impact on other sports. Casual fans might decide to watch the NFL on a particular weekend instead of going to a rugby or football match, but casual fans aren't going to go to more than one or two NFL games a season anyway. Besides, there aren't anywhere near 85000 regular rugby-going fans in the south to steal from anyway
I think people will be confused about the technicalities of the rules, but the basic idea of the game isn't that difficult. It would take years to fully understand the tactics etc, but I don't think that is so important. I think the real problem is that fans who go for the novelty won't go eight times a year, and without the real passion for "their" team, fans might not be so keen to watch an expansion team struggling for a few years. The NFL Europe crowds were good, after all, in London Monarch's first year when they did well, but slumped badly afterwards, when the team wasn't so good. And that was for a much shorter season.
The saving grace of American football is you know exactly when something is going to happen, due to it's design being based around "plays". To be honest, there are a lot of Americans who don't bother to learn, or even care about the technical side, the simply enjoy seeing what happens each down. The basic idea of the game is easy to get, the rest is arbitrary. And , our announcers assume most people will not know the details, so they're very good at explaining everything because the breaks in play allow them time to do so.
I can't stand watching commercials and the worst is paying loads of $$$ to watch just the college version to sit while they play an a** load of commercials.
It's the main reason I don't watch the NFL as much anymore. Unless I'm watching a game at someone's house, I'll record LSU games, and wait an hour before starting it, by the time I catch up the damn game is still on. I'm not the only person I know who does this either. The NFL seems to be able to cram more and more every year, it's ridiculous. I understand why they use advertising, but, doesn't mean I'm going to participate in it.
Using Bills games in Toronto as an example. The pro-NFL types in the city thought it would be a slam dunk. But high ticket prices, not everyone who is a NFL fan in Toronto is a Bills fan, no tailgating (Ontario regs) and subpar game experience (compared to Bills in Buffalo) has resulted in NFL in Toronto games largely been papered. If you worked for a large corp in the city, you had a chance of getting free tix. Part of the problem with North American pro leagues is that a lot of stuff is manufactured rather than being organic. As this article states: This (EPL) is an ocean away from, say, the typical NFL game, which consists of eight (8!) minutes of on-field action crammed into three hours, thankfully relieved by Mensan television commentary, prediction and biography, the spiritual delights of the huddle, the time out and the challenged call being reviewed by video replay, then a welcome commercial variation on the theme of beer. What does this say about us as sports fans, or rather, what do North American teams, leagues and broadcasters think of us, as fans? http://www.thestar.com/news/insight...ean-sports-fans-still-own-the-game-experience