It’s fun to watch the National Football League try to find its way into international markets, especially since there’s no way it could possibly get any bigger in America. Of course, with NFL Europa officially calling it a day, commissioner Roger Goodell has new challenges ahead of him — like how to keep Europeans interested in a game that’s kinda like rugby, but not quite.
One way to do it? Start a football academy in England.
The plan is to offer scholarships to 18-year-olds who would enrol on a four-year course. On top of academic work, they would be trained intensively by coaches imported from America. The hope is that, on graduation, they would be picked up by NFL teams. The scheme will initially be available at a single institution.
“We don’t have an iconic British player,” David Tossell, NFL International’s director of public affairs, said. “There are two ways you can do it — a short-term fix, importing someone like a Jonny Wilkinson, or a long-term plan, developing players. The NFL is not indigenous to anywhere apart from America, so we don’t have a supply of international players going into the league.”
This is a great idea, right up to the point where Homeland Security denies their work visas, claiming they’re filthy foreigners out to steal jobs from Americans.
Really, the only reason to create such an academy is to get more people outside of America to watch the NFL and perhaps play a little fantasy football — which, by the way, is perfectly legal, thank you very much. The league has a huge college talent pool from which to grab talented players, but nobody in Brixton has any real connection to LaDainian Tomlinson. The best way to get people interested is to give them at least one local player to give a damn about. That’s why the AFL is so popular in Ireland; guys like Tadhg Kennelly and Martin Clarke are local boys, and Irish sports fans want to see them do well.
This explains Goodell’s quest for a Chinese NFL star. The league is attempting to break through in China, though it’s clearly having some trouble with that.
For the record, in Chinese the game is known as “Mei shi gan lan qiu,” which can mean “American-style rugby” or “American-style olive-shaped ball,” depending on the translation.
A touchdown is a “da zhen.”
The quarterback is the “si fen wei” — the one-fourth position.
There’s a little place on Miami Boulevard that serves a decent da zhen lunch special, actually. They go light on the garlic, which is key…
And then there are the byzantine rules. New England Patriots tight end Benjamin Watson has been spending a few days trying to explain strategy and tactics to Chinese fans and reporters.
“We need to teach about throwing and catching and some of the rules of the game,” Watson said. “About where players line up. The game is almost like a chess match.”
Somewhere, Walter Camp is smiling, but this has bugger-all to do with the price of tea in China. At some point, the NFL has to realize that getting people outside of America interested in this game will always be an uphill battle, because American football is just… well, foreign. It’s a difficult football code to grasp, it doesn’t offer continuous action like some other codes, it’s expensive to play because of the extra equipment required (helmets, pads, etc.), and it requires specialization on a level unseen in other codes. It’s not a game like soccer and basketball that just about anyone can play.
That’s not to say I don’t think it isn’t a glorious game to watch on an autumn weekend, but I grew up watching this game. If I had grown up with some other form of football, I might find American football utterly baffling. Globalizing this game will require demystifying it first. I can’t even fathom how most of the Japanese sporting audience will react to the American Football World Cup next week, and many of them actually know something about this game.
(Speaking of which, I’m really trying to stay interested in the American Football World Cup. Really. But man, it’s a struggle. Even QB Jeff Ballard looks like he gave up on his training camp journal after two days…)
