The NFL in London Pure Genius

As I sit here enjoying watching an NFL game on Sunday morning.  I can’t help but think how the NFL has struck Gold with their NFL in London football plan.  When they first started doing these games I though why.  Why would you want to jet teams 5 hours across the “Pond” to play games.  How does that make sense.  That was before I realized just how much the rest of the world is interested in watching American Football.   I was listening to one of the local sports radio shows before the game started and the host said that playing games in London is absurd.  He did not offer any reason how he came to that conclusion.  This started me thinking about why would it be absurd to be playing games in another country.

The only conclusion that I could come to is that it is not absurd but is actually pure genius.  In order to back up my conclusion here there are a few things that need to be looked at.  What is the main purpose of the NFL?   As I see it the main purpose of the NFL is to entertain.   It is nothing more and nothing less.  The NFL is reality TV with no script.  Well at least we hope there is not script but the prospect of that is not part of this discussion.  The result of that entertainment is to tie people to their team and then tie them to the NFL.  By building this relationship it leads to people wanting to spend their money on the NFL.  It brings people to the Stadiums to their TV’s to their Computers to Fantasy Football and so on and so on.  The end result being Billions of dollars being spent on the NFL by the football fanatics.

While the NFL is the most popular sport in the United States it is not even close to being the most popular sport in the world.  While it is hard to find any exact numbers.  Most of the information that I could find did not have American Football in the top 5 and most of them did not even have them in the top 10 of most viewed sports.   Every list however did have Soccer(Football) as the number one sport in the world by a large margin. Second pointed to Cricket, Tennis, Baseball and Hockey.  But not Ice Hockey, Field Hockey.   In the United Stated how many of you even knew that Field Hockey has professional sports leagues?  Me either.

To the rest of the world American Football is pretty much non existent.  The Super Bowl is the one game a year that the world outside of the USA pays attention to.  While that is nice to get such a large viewership for the one game the NFL would much rather rope the rest of the world into paying attention to the whole season rather than just the one game.

If you want to bring the rest of the world in.  You can’t do it by just broadcasting the games to other countries.  You have capture their attention the way you did in the United States.  The only way to do that is to have live games in those locations.  You have to make them feel a connection to the teams the way that they have a connection with their local Soccer Club (SC)  LOL   I wonder why NFL teams never felt the need to add an FC to the end of their team name.  The Green Bay Packers FC.  We already know it is a Football Club?  I don’t know  but it is an interesting topic.

The NFL created a league a few years ago in Europe that was like a minor league with a few players that would someday play in the NFL.  If you want to bring in the mass fans you have to play games with the best players.  It took a few years but the NFL figured that out.  Disbanded the league and came up with the plan to play NFL games over there that had actual meaning in the season.

As the NFL builds an audience in London I fully believe that in the next few years they will put a team there full time.  To really make it work they need to have at least two teams there so that there is a game in London every week of the season. By doing this they will be able to build a fan base that will lead to gaining more world interest in American Football.  The NFL is the most successful sport in the United States as far as the number of fans and the amount of money they generate.  This falls way behind Soccer and other sports in the rest of the world.  The NFL is on a mission to change this and grab what they consider their share of the money that is out there.   I think they are on the right track.  What do you think?