(Inter)National Football League

I’ve waited a couple of weeks to write. I wanted to let the dust settle, reassess the situation, see if my opinion changed. It hasn’t so I thought I’d unload. In case you missed it, and if you follow sports it’s difficult to, on October 25th Wembley stadium in London, England played host to an NFL regular season game. For the third year running. I don’t have much of a problem with NFL teams playing games in England, just regular season games. In 2008 the San Diego Chargers played the New Orleans Saints at Wembley. Before the Chargers played the Saints they had to fly across eight time zones, EIGHT! Imagine flying from California to England alone, it wrecks anybody for about a week. Then they were asking these guys to play to the highest standard of their profession. Unsurprisingly they lost. There are now four pre-season games for NFL teams, play one of those at Wembley, it’ll keep the fans happy, it will make the NFL the same amount of money and it takes less out of the players both physically and mentally.

While I don’t like the idea of playing regular season games in London I positively despise the other idea that’s come out of it. An NFL franchise in London. Yeah double take, I always do. This idea is so unsustainable in so many different ways. It would provide a scheduling nightmare for the league figuring out how to plug a five hour time difference. Can you imagine trying to figure out how to work in 8 home and 8 road games for a team who are nine hours away from the closest current NFL franchise. Another big problem is talent. Where would the London teams players magically appear from? College is the obvious answer. Do you however really believe that a 21 year-old kid will want to move to a foreign country regardless of the pay check? Some of these kids will not have been out of their State never mind the United States.

This is different to Hockey, who opened their league season with games in Scandinavia. The easy reason this worked is because over half the NHL players are from Scandinavia or Eastern Europe. The distance however means that an NHL franchise in Norway or Sweden isn’t even being talked about. The influx of big name European players into the NBA also makes playing games in Europe a little more feasible as well. David Stern has mentioned an European NBA franchise but, like normal, no one listened to David Stern.

If the British public had an NFL franchise in London what is there that’s unique about the sport to this public. It is an American sport, and that is it’s appeal to a big group of people whether they know it or not. It doesn’t have the history or tradition as it does in America, because it’s American. Would people continue to go and pay the NFL prices if it was 8 weeks a year instead of 1. There’s the scary prospect of any London franchise becoming a cold weather Jacksonville with an increasing low attendances and dwindling fan bases.

What should be the final nail in this ideas coffin is this; look at how American sports have faired in Britain so far. They have become irrelevant, almost ignored and why? Because people lost interest. This has been one of the biggest things I noticed about this talk; people saying they fell in love with football in the 80’s lost interest in the 90’s and now have found fallen back in love. What if this happens with a franchise in London? What do they do if it becomes like British hockey and basketball? It would be a disaster for England, Football and the NFL and would be on the very first plane to Los Angeles.