A Long Way From Lambeau
Monarchs Mk.2
by Mark Lyne-Austen
14/5/2009
Commissioner Roger Goodell has been discussing the possibility of running two regular season games in the UK for the 2010 season and reaching a market outside of London would be welcomed but a game or two in the UK does not mean that football is lined up to become the global contact sport. The prospects of the game exporting successfully outside of North America are just not as strong as we'd all like with serious issues that the Commissioner will need to assess.
The opportunity to see an NFL game a year has been tremendous. Like others at the Diner, I will be heading to my third later this year but the spectacle of a match is not all that holds a fascination with a sport. The tribal passions that soccer so expertly exploits are the main driver behind larger audiences. Those passions cannot be aroused by a game a year between new teams with no native attachment. Interest in the game has definitely picked up but without a home team to cheer for, an annual game featuring the latest US teams to be selected will not be popular forever.
NFL Europe was ultimately deemed a failure after enjoying popularity in the early going and blame has been placed on it being a second rate group of players being involved. For that to be true, NFL regular season games have to embody a special quality of intensity and importance. The suggestion of diluting the season by adding an additional two games goes against the significance that each game holds with more irrelevant matches and each result having less of an effect on the overall standings.
Games in the UK are clearly part of a bigger plan though the size of that design is not yet obvious. At it's narrowest, the strategy is a temporary merchandising boost by selling goodies to Brits though with Commissioner Goodell looking for sources of new revenue, other markets must be on his mind. In looking at the UK as the primary international market and not going to say Germany, the NFL is indicating that the future of the game outside of the US is in at most a UK franchise. For those Diner frequenters based in the UK that will be great but it is not a truly international spread.
NFL Europe was never especially widespread but it was not the UK that supported the league most effectively. By far the largest fanbase was found in Germany and this cannot only have been because of the large numbers of US armed forces based in that country. Much credit has been handed to the NFL UK personnel for their attracting the international series but the league will need to think more widely if it genuinely seeks new markets to enjoy.
The single biggest obstacle facing international expansion of popularity is that there is a dominant competitor - Rugby. Rugby Union is the most significant full contact ball sport globally and features much lower setup costs than the NFL can ever achieve. While it is an inferior pastime, Rugby is on the march and the NFL is nowhere. Rugby has already become the second sport (behind soccer) in Argentina, encroaching into the US sphere of influence. Growing tremendously in Japan and Russia, Rugby is already the national sport of much of the south Pacific. The space for international expansion has diminished.
While this Diner regular would like to see real international expansion with teams scattered around the globe including one at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, there are fundamental problems that the NFL may never overcome. While Soccer has shown that sports fans are capable of pledging loyalty to players from far and wide, the players themselves are less willing to ply their trade abroad. Despite talk about the Arizona Cardinals moving to the Azteca stadium in Mexico City, there has been no realistic prospect of a Mexican team because elite players from the USA just do not want to live there.
As it is extraordinarily rare for a country other than the USA to produce an NFL calibre player, international teams would have to exist in an environment approved of by NFL players. Perhaps this might explain Goodell's singular focus on the UK – London is after all sufficiently culturally similar to US cities (if much less violent). However, it would be far enough away from the saturation coverage that can motivate a superstar to put off the elite college players.
The problem for Goodell is that the series of games that the UK has benefited from is not a sustainable proposition. As an anecdote, less than half of this Dinerist's fantasy league made it back for the second game. Their love for the game enough to follow a specific team and to track their fantasy standings but not enough to entice them to another match featuring teams they do not particularly care for without the allure of that first ever NFL experience.
Goodell will surely have picked up the overwhelming opposition to the international series of games in the UK from US fans. While franchises do earn a lot more from a Wembley date than they do from their standard home fixture the core season ticket holding market at home is genuinely at risk of revolting.
Without some broad idea of what it is that Goodell is trying to achieve, the fanbase in the States will continue to oppose international games while at the same time more games in the UK will tap out the interest unless there is a reason to support a team. The current model can not last forever and though it can be extended by visiting other countries as well, the league will eventually have to decide just how ambitious it wants to be. UK fans will enjoy what we have while it lasts, we can hope for more in the future but be sure that what there is now is not forever.
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