And good luck with that, Commish.
It’s little wonder that the NFL wants to re-establish American football in England, going so far as to host a regular-season NFL game in Wembley Stadium next season. NFL Europe has kind of degraded into NFL Germany; all the UK-based teams either folded or moved. If Roger Goodell can get England excited about American football again, he could find a way to bring NFL Europe back to England, or perhaps even establish a new English league that could develop more players.
England is where the money is, of course, but is it where the fans are? Sports fans in that country are much more excited about the variations of football they created. English Premier League soccer has never been bigger, and attendance for Guinness Premiership games has grown consistently in the last five years, though it’s only at 10,000+ per game. How do you convince those fans that Walter Camp’s chess match is more exciting than the games they grew up loving?
Clearly, Goodell’s mission is to establish an international beachhead, but perhaps London isn’t the best place to pull it off. Most Brits love to argue how Association Football is the “real football” because players actually use their feet, while American football is just a descendant of rugby with less kicking and too much stopping and starting, and it’s not very popular outside of America. No doubt, English sports columnists will drag these tired old arguments out again as the London game approaches — not to mention the talk of how David Beckham will be bigger in L.A. than any Manning will ever be in London — and when it’s over, they’ll blather on about getting back to their own football games.
Perhaps Goodell would have more success elsewhere in a country a little more interested. Perhaps Berlin would have been a better choice, given NFL Europe’s success in Germany. Hey, the Germans have a team in the American Football World Cup. So does Sweden, who are officially the European champs of American football. So does Japan, the defending World Cup champs who have 394 high school, college and corporate teams established in that country. Perhaps these are the places where American football would play much better.
And all this, of course, would just be a prelude to the “NFL World Tour,” in which Goodell establishes more developmental leagues and gives them airtime on NFL Network. Think about it — wouldn’t expansion developmental leagues like NFL Japan and NFL Mexico be nice additions next to NFL Germany? Hell, if those leagues take off, maybe the 2011 World Cup will actually mean something.
For now, though, we’ve got a Sunday night in Wembley ahead of us, and playing Wembley is always a big deal. I just have my doubts that the English will show American football that much love. Given the increased freedom of movement among Europeans these days, there may be a lot of Germans and Swedes in that crowd. Let’s just hope for the cameramen’s sake that the Swedish fans are mostly female.
