Oct 25 2007
The NFL in Wembley. Whatever.
Y’know, I want to say more about this whole NFL game in Wembley Stadium thing, but really, I can’t be arsed. The New York Giants and Miami Dolphins are playing in London. Woo. Let’s repay the favor with a West Ham v. Middlesbrough game at Giants Stadium.
Of course, our pal MJD is doing the best he can to make the Brits feel at home with this foreign football.
Americans think they need a lot of scoring to be entertained, but they don’t … for example, in this country, baseball, hockey (well, a few of us), and a golf tournament with a winning score of +1 can still draw huge ratings. A lack of scoring is an excuse we make for not liking soccer, when the truth is just that we can’t embrace it because it’s not our game, it’s not from our culture, and we’re not very good at it.
Mostly, we just have this neat trick of making one score count for 6 (likely 7) points. Maybe you should try this with soccer. Don’t change the game in any other way, but make each goal worth 100,000 points. Then we might love it.
Soccer as 1990s pinball machines. It could work.
Of course, the KSK Gay Mafia is chiming in as well.
I’m sure the remaining 6 of you actual UK natives will learn to enjoy watching Eli Manning overthrow receivers with the same inexplicable sense of schadenfreude as us Americans.
Personally, I love how everyone pushes the gridiron v. soccer angle and conveniently ignores that they play this little game called rugby in England — and two types of rugby, at that — and it just happens to be the forefather for American football. We’d be playing rugby today if that bastard Walter Camp had just left well enough alone. Chess-loving freak. It’s a proven fact that chess drives people batshit insane. Look at Bobby Fischer and tell me I’m wrong.
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NFL has been doing this Wembley thing since the late 1980’s. Apart from selling more NFL hats and t-shirts in Europe I don’t really see what’s in it for the NFL. NFL isn’t going to expand beyond its home base in North America. Foreign TV rights are not going to be worth much more than they are now. Twenty years has not changed this situation. Even the NFL gave up on NFL Europa eventually.
I can’t see the NFL–or any major sports league for that matter–giving up on globalisation.
That said, I think Goodell would have better luck focusing more on markets relatively unsaturated with RU and RL. China, Russia, Scandinavia, and Latin America come to mind.
Actually RU has a pretty good foothold in those countries too, on the amateur level.
Yeah, I meant closer to a semi-professional/professional level. At least… I hope I meant that.
I’m with B.A. here. It’ll be much easier to sell gridiron in places where there’s no professional RU or RL. China might be a better market than England or Australia, though it would be easier to sell the game there if there were a Chinese player in the NFL, a la Yao Ming in the NBA. Australia’s only paying attention because of guys like Sav Rocca and Ben Graham, and how much impact can they have as punters?
Gridiron, unlike baseball or basketball, is not an easy sport to export. It has a number of things that make it harder to adopt: more complex rules, more complex and expensive equipment, etc.
Consider how long it took basketball to develop in Europe and Asia - and it did so through FIBA affiliated national federations. The NBA had nothing to do with it, NBA was a globalist johnny-come-lately reaping the harvests sown by others.
Same situation with baseball; the only “export” success was in Japan about a hundred and twenty years ago; the real growth of baseball worldwide was through its own international organization and its affiliated national federations; MLB had nothing to do with this.
Likewise soccer grew in the USA through grassroots amateur organizations and through local businessmen willing to put money into both the amateur and the professional game. Soccer did not grow in this country due to the efforts of European leagues.
The problem with NFL is that is has absolutely no grass-roots organizations to speak of outside the USA. It simply isn’t going to have much long term success with its top-down approach. It may get some people to watch NFL games overseas but it isn’t going to build up a gridiron culture in those countries using these methods.
i have just watched a great football match between liverpool and arsenal
what a game 90 minutes of pure brilliance speed agility strength passion contact you name it it was there
well i thought i would have a little look at whats going on at wembley i wished i had not bothered stop start tv breaks more stop start more tv breaks what a bore
and whats all that padding and helmets about.i hope these players watched the rugby league last night and world rugby cup final last week and feel a little embarsed
this mark guy wat is he talking about his english literature is shocking maybe he should ask someone for english lessons ill do it for you if u want.
and nfl is for pansys rugby league, rugby union and football good english bulldog games.
I have to agree with Mark. I and my boyfriend had a gander at the NFL in London. I don’t know how much space there is to post here, so I will summarise:
Yeah, the helmets and padding! Do rugby players need it? No, so why do they? And how about the players with fat backsides, wobbley bear bellies and man boobs? Seen in Rugby? I think not.
After 10 minutes I had realized that it was perfectly normal for the game to have longer stops than sustained action. Yawn!
After 20 minutes it was becoming tedious. Is this a Sport? Run a bit and try to catch the ball. Stop. Have a break and do it again. I used to play that with my brother in the back garden as a kid. We also stopped frequently, maybe for a drink, a sandwich or listen to our mum on the sidelines (the patio) The only bit we didn’t do was the brawling - maybe that’s what the helmet and clobber are for.
At about 30 minutes, my boyfriend painfully uttered, “what in hell is this all about, I’ve had enough”. I must admit, I felt the same way. Ooh wait, there was a touchdown. Hang on, he didn’t even touch it down, just ran over the line an down the tunnel. Was that it?
Right, we promised each other never to go through the whole charade again and to stick to Rugby and football (as in English). And then it dawned on us, thank god we were only watching the highlights!
Hey. I’m an American football fan here. I’ll try to defend my sport.
First, I think the breaks (not the commercial breaks) in American Football make the sport more exciting. The breaks create a certain tension that soccer (football) and rugby don’t have. The stop-start nature of American football makes every play important as opposed to soccer (football), where the free-flowing nature of the sport tends to make the action seem unimportant.
As for the pads, without going into too much detail, rugby is a contact sport and American football is a collision sport. Also, we tried to forgo the pads, but too many people died.
What some of the posters above experienced with American football, I experienced with British sports. For example, I like rugby union, but the next collapsed scrum or kick into touch I see, I think I am going to SCREAM!!!
I guess we don’t understand each other’s football.
Dave, I think you need to post on why you like American football.
That said, I think the NFL would be more sucessful in countries where rugby is not as popular, like Mexico and Germany
“And how about the players with fat backsides, wobbley bear bellies and man boobs? Seen in Rugby? I think not”.
How many front rower do you know then, Here is Leinsters finest
http://www.leinsterrugby.ie/members/index.asp?locID=37&docID=1418
http://www.leinsterrugby.ie/members/index.asp?locID=37&docID=1787
http://www.sporting-heroes.net/files_rugby/LE_ROUX_Ollie_19981205_NF_L.jpg
Some big lads .
Collision Vs. Contact: that’s my mantra in these discussions.
I have watched rugby and enjoyed it. However, and I’m referring to an aggregate here, Rugby hits are not the same as American football hits. Perhaps in part BECAUSE of the stop and start nature, the players are better rested, and there’s no doubt they are going full speed from exactly opposite directions. Also, without blocking, there are simply FEWER hits.
To enjoy American Football, you have to think of each play as a fully calculated and planned set piece. To use Association football references, maybe a corner or a free kick from 30 yards out (but with even more variety because remember, this is the entirety of the game; “Soccer”’s complexity lies elsewhere). The wall has to be set, the players have to figure out who they’re going to mark, the movement before the ball is delivered has to be just spot-on, the player(s) on the ball have to decide where to go with it, the pass has to be just right, and/or the offensive players have to try to get the defenders out of position. It’s a brutal sport , but the brutality can be quite elegant (as when Indianapolis destroyed my beloved Jaguars last week). Also, there IS a build up between plays: what will happen next, how will the organization of tyhe sides match up, were the personnel changes made properly– hell, WILL the offense begin their play on time. There is a LOT going on. Before I was a fan of association football, I did not appreciate the intricacies of the run of play, but I’ve learned enough to know that there is a LOT going on there too.
I don’t imagine I’ll convince anyone to give up there pet peeves, as frankly rugby union is still a dizzying mess to me most of the time, probably because I am happy with the time I already invest in following other things. I understand that there is much I don’t see about many sports, and I try not to presume that the players and fans of those other sports are dullards with bad taste.
There are too many g-d commercials over here, though.
I notice how everyone thinks that the code they did not grow up with is “boring”. Well, duh; you don’t know what is going on.
To those of you frustrated with rugby union’s constant scrum collapses and other delays - try rugby league. It doesn’t have these delays so you get more of the constant, free flowing action like you get in soccer. And for a number of other reasons it is easier for a gridiron fan to understand rugby league than rugby union.
@Joe: the free flowing action of soccer and rugby is precisely what make the action seem more important, not less; lack of breaks create tension, too. You just don’t understand what is going on, just like the critics of gridiron don’t understand what is going on during those long, long stretches of time in an NFL game when the ball isn’t moving.
@Simon,
Yes those are some big lads, but the other poster has a point. Those big lads are still nowhere near the size of gridiron linesmen, who have been evolving a bit towards sumo-wrestler status, since the stop-start nature of gridiron calls for more sudden bursts of energy and much less for stamina and endurance, since players are only in motion for very short periods of time. So gridiron linesmen aren’t just big and strong, but also very heavy with lots of extra fat that wouldn’t be feasible in rugby where you do have to be able to run or at least jog for 80 minutes.
@ At different dave.
I understand that the Gridiron lads are bigger but my reply was in direct reply to the notion that Union lads are like Greek Gods or in some way well defined and that you wouldn’t see a beer belly or man boobs on a Rugby pitch .
it does not matter whos the biggest iam afraid the game is just so slow and boring it lacks passion pride comitment and most of all pace which we see week in week out in FOOTBALL rubgy union and rugby league
please just leave it over there where size matters mainly there egos
@Simon
Sure, those guys you linked to are big and have a bit of fat on them, but that hardly puts them in the “fat backsides, wobbley bear bellies and man boobs” category.
Nor did I read that other poster’s statement to imply that all rugby players were built like Greek Gods, either.
We’re quibbling over semantics at this point, of course.
I suppose in rugby union you can get away with a bit of extra fat for the guys in the scrum because you need the extra weight in the pack. I’ve been watching South Sydney Story on Versus here in the States (documentary about Russell Crowe’s Rabbitohs rugby league club) and have noticed that all of the players are quite lean. I suspect that this is because rugby league has a very limited use for the scrum and involves constant running, whereas in rugby union the scrum is much more important and there is more “standing around time” than there is in rugby league. Or that would be my guess anyway.
@mark: What you saw was a particularly poorly played game in a particularly poor atmosphere. And this is from a life-long Giants fan. There are staggering amounts of passion in gridiron, just as there are ungodly boring games of ten-men-behind-the-ball tactics. Judging the sport on what went on in Wembley is like Americans who judge soccer because their exposure to it comes solely from dull semi-pro leagues or their kids’ youth team. They’ve never seen what the game can be or frequently is.
I was watching various games on Saturday with some friends, among whom were three Germans, a Englishman, and a Spaniard. Every once and a while we’d flip to Penn State-Ohio State, a college gridiron game, with 108,000 in the stands, and not even they could help but be stunned.
For all you who didn’t enjoy the game yesterday , I’d suggest watching some College ball. Same game with out ad breaks every 30seconds, a major plus for me
american football is dull as anything, they just stop every 2 seconds, rugby is so more entertaining.
the nfl will never succeed here (its far more popular in germany anyway - thats where the london and scottish teams had to go to survive in nfl europe), they just want to sell us stuff and it easy coz we speak english.
i’m not anti-american for the sake of it, just give us some space
I am a Yank who has grown disenchanted with NFL football. The constant barrage of commercials makes me feel manipulated. And the emphasis on collisions, instead of tackling, seems to sum up the intrinsic violent nature of American culture. The greed of the NFL, exploiting every break in play to cram more tv ads down the viewers throat is something I no longer want to be part of.
The problem with gridiron football is not the sport itself, it’s what the NFL and NCAA have done to it. The stop-start nature of the sport wouldn’t be nearly the problem it is if it weren’t for the obsession with taking commercial breaks throughout the game.
And as for the helmets/pads argument, it’s kind of a silly one. American football helmets make the game far, far more dangerous to players than Rugby. Yes, ruggers get their fair share of cuts, bruises and knocks, but the composite helmets of gridiron players allow them to be used as weapons, resulting in large numbers of concussions as well as severe, career-ending joint injuries such as ACL tears. The force of a helmet hitting a knee, ankle, hip or elbow is so severe that even a seemingly innocuous play can result in a player like Donovan McNabb (one of the NFL’s best) missing half an entire season.
All that said, I personally prefer the improvisational nature of association football, but American football could learn some things about how tv timeouts and delays really damage it.