London Calling: The Globalization of the NFL

Today, football (in american eyes) is a sport mainly played on the American continent. The NFL (National Football league) has base in America, but are supposed to control all organized forms of professional football. Lately NFL has shown interest to expand its operations outside of the USA. They want the sport to grow bigger; to become an international and global sport, and not only a american. 

An expansion of the sport will have a lot of benefits. First of all, it will create a bigger audience, more supporters, and thereby a greater economy for the sport. The sport will get better TV coverage, more sponsors and more consumers. An international NFL will also lead to better recruiting, which will further lead to greater performances and higher level in the sport. 

But where to start? Apparently, London has been chosen as there expansion site. I find this pretty natural. It is the one of the first countries you reach by crossing the Atlantic ocean. Moreover, England is considered the greatest soccer nation in the world. Soccer and football have a lot of common values and the game setup has quite some similarities, and one can therefore imagine that the British population will easily adapt the  "new" sport. Furthermore, Europeans has a trend to watch British sports and leagues. By making American football a part of the English sport, NFL hope football can expand further out in Europa, and on long-term basis become an international sport. 

However, there are some dark sides of this plan. First of all, since all organized professional football are under the control of NFL, which is one league, teams would be forced to travel long distances and turn the time-zone completely around for playing a game. It would also be necessary with different salary cups for the team playing in Europe, because of the different tax rules and prices. Further on the European team would probably have an American base, to avoid a lot of traveling. But then again, what is the point of an European team, if it only travels to Europe few times a year to play home games? 

An other question worth thinking about is of course whether Europe is ready for an football invasion in the first place. With soccer being such a great sport, especially in England, among with many others (especially winter sports), NFL might end up loosing more than winning.     

Reference:

Bamwell, Bill (2013, Aug 12). London Calling. Grantland. Retrieved from http://www.grantland.com/print?id=9615240.