London Is Still Calling For The NFL
The NFL’s strange fixation with London continues on Sunday as the Kansas City Chiefs travel to play the Detroit Lions at Wembley Stadium. The NFL has been playing football in London for over 20 years now–it’s supposedly a part of some vague ‘expansion strategy’ but so far its one without an apparent endgame. Were this a different matchup I might gripe about teams losing a home game but at a combined 3-11 I’d imagine that the Kansas City Chiefs and Detroit Lions are happy to get out of the country for awhile. For what it’s worth, the Chiefs are the home team in this matchup which will begin at 9:30 PM Eastern Time (a brutal 6:30 AM start in the sports books of Las Vegas!).
The NFL’s attempt to export football is called ‘ambitious’ by sports media shills but a more appropriate word is ‘interminable’. In an era when new businesses ‘export’ their product in a matter of weeks (eg: Uber’s ride sharing service) the NFL’s move into the mindspace of the British sports fan is downright pokey. There will be three games played in London this year and next year there will be a whopping….four games! The NFL is the epitome of analog era big business so they’re obviously big on incrementalism but by this point they should have figured out what the long term goal is. There’s nothing wrong with a few games in a neutral site every year and to date the NFL has done strong business in London. But if the long term goal is to locate a team there this isn’t the way to go about it. The arguments for a ‘go slow’ approach point to the hit and miss success of the now defunct World League of American Football and to the fact that US football is still a novelty in a country (and on a continent) dominated by a different kind of ‘football’, aka soccer. If the NFL thinks that they’ll one day top soccer/football they should disabuse themselves of that notion right now.
But if the goal is to create a viable team in London to establish a European ‘beachhead’ why wait? The NFL would immediately be no worse than the #4 team spectator sport in England and most likely higher–behind soccer and probably cricket (and maybe rugby). Even so, that’s not a bad start and the reality is that there’s no way that they can become part of any country’s sports culture with a handful of games per year. Londoners need their own team to get emotionally invested in on a game to game basis for that to happen. It’s not much different than what the MLS soccer league has had to do–and done so successfully. Ditto NHL hockey franchises in places like Nashville and Tampa Bay that aren’t traditional hotbeds of the game. True, NHL teams in the Sun Belt have been hit and miss but the aforementioned Predators and Lightning are solid on and off the ice. The NHL has handcuffed the game by not moving teams from markets where it’s clearly not working–like the Florida Panthers who have a talented and exciting young team but have the #28 attendance in the NHL playing to 80% capacity.
For now, the NFL will continue their tedious flirtation with Europe. Don’t be surprised if one of the other major North American sports beats them there–or perhaps a European sport establishing a base on US soil.