Should The NFL Bring Back A European League?

Last Sunday, 84000 excited fans from across the UK filled a London sports stadium to watch a bunch of huge athletes toss around a weirdly-shaped ball. No, I’m not talking about the Rugby Union World Cup semi-final. That game clocked in at just over 80000.

I’m talking about the other game, at Wembley Stadium. While American Football has consolidated itself as the sport of the United States, it’s still peered at by the British media with a combination of amused curiosity and supercilious distaste. The most recent of the NFL’s International Series, which saw the Jacksonville Jaguars defeat the Buffalo Bills, barely merited a sliver of a page in one particular national newspaper the morning after the game.

It’s strange. As with political movements the UK media seem blissfully ignorant of the blossoming fan base of a sport they’ve disregarded for 50 years. It’s unlikely American Football will ever supplant the sport from which it stole its name (sorry America, soccer is not a real word) in Britain or Europe. What’s becoming clear though, is that Brits will turn out to see the spectacle of the NFL even for the most mundane of games.

So what am I saying? It might be time to revive the once-reviled NFL Europe. Almost a decade after the project was scrapped, the NFL’s European experiment might be ready for a second attempt.

For those of you who know next to nothing about American Football, neither the Jacksonville Jaguars or the Buffalo Bills are considered particularly outstanding teams right now. Between them, there isn’t a single big-name star that might draw casual fans to the stadium. In many ways, it might be the equivalent of a Premier League relegation battle, if NFL had any sort of equivalent to relegation.

Despite this, British fans turned out like a jersey wearing zombie armada for the dubious privilege of seeing two average teams slug it out with very little at stake. This has prompted years of overdrawn talk about bringing an NFL team to London permanently, but there are a lot of reasons this is a bad idea. Existing fans in the UK already have a team and asking them to suddenly support a London ‘franchise’ just wouldn’t fly.

Bringing back NFL Europe, with some important tweaks, would allow fans to hang on to their existing North American allegiance while adopting a second team in a league closer to home. By its demise in 2007 NFL Europe had become a place for American teams to loan out inexperienced players who needed more game experience, and some teams were shut down and reopened on a whim.

With its International Series in London though, it’s obvious the NFL has hopes their sport can eventually go global. If it has the patience for teams to steadily grow their fan base and if it attempts to recruit local players, the league will eventually reap the rewards. The hunger for American Football is growing in the UK, as well as other European Countries like Russia. Germans are also massive fans of the sport. If the NFL are smart, they’ll take advantage.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t expect 84,000 fans to gather in London every week. With only three games a year in the UK, fans often pack Wembley to the roof because it’s all they’re given. If the NFL made enough noise about it and went in with moderate expectations, it’s not unreasonable to presume NFL Europe could gather regular attendances of 15,000 or more.

Many fans of the English Premier League have slowly become disillusioned by the amount of money in the sport and the cost of attending games. These are fans who are there for the taking. Maybe it’s time for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to take a leap of faith and bring back NFL Europe.

The truth is an NFL Europe league may never match the quality and popularity of its American cousin. The United States has a decades old system for bringing new talent into the game, with nearly every high school in America having a team and universities ploughing money into lavish sports programmes and stadiums. Europe lacks the same structures as well as the inclination to spend the time and money which would be needed to create them.

On the other hand, an NFL Europe really need not be on the same level as America to succeed. European fans will happily watch two teams who haven’t had a play-off run between them since 2007. Neither Jacksonville nor Buffalo are likely to do so this season either. We’ll take anything we can get, and we’ll also fork out a small fortune for a team jersey if you entertain us.