London is the same distance from New York as New York is to LA. Maybe you don't get jet lag in the US time zones?
What has English citizens got to do with it? I don't want to watch English citizens, I want to see Yanks who are brilliant at the game. The commercial US market for the NFL is saturated...in marketing terms the UK is product extension. Sport is now global and Britain is now buying up Gamepass faster than anywhere else in the world. As for tax and player refusal - seriously?!
You don't have to sell out every game. How many NFL teams sell out every week and who pulls in 83,000? This is about accessing a new, fresh market...
The merchandising alone for the ONE British team is a phenomenal amount of revenue. Selling tickets is chump change.
Well, I can remember the London Monarchs. The NFL is very hungry for that market and agree with you. I'm just not sure you can get the kind of numbers they want (TV, etc) unless people closely follow the sport and it's played widely in that country. And if it is there will be a lot of new players coming from Europe. But you're right they are not looking for new players they are looking for your money.
Only if Britain as a whole gets behind it. The vast majority of existing fans of the sport already have their team and there has been significant discussion on this in the UK over the last few years. The vast majority, and I'm betting over 80%, wouldn't entertain supporting a UK based team even as a second team. There would undoubtedly be a lot of interest for a few years - the novelty of a London franchise would see to that - but after that the franchise would need to have built it's own fanbase and I'm not sure it can. However, you are right, in that if a London franchise could get established and overcome the logistical difficulties then it would have the potential to turnover a vast amount of revenue. That's why Goodell is so keen on it. But there's a couple of pretty big ifs in there.
They could bring a team to the city of my birth, call it the London Porters (one of my favourite beers) and they'll never be my team. I would probably take in a game or two over a season, but... ...I've been a Jets fan since the age of 8 (now 40), at that age I needed to wait a week for the highlights show (one hour a week) and sit through the featured game (almost never the Jets) for the round up in which the Jets usually seemed to lose. As time went by the newspapers here carried the scores on a Wednesday (or if we were lucky a Tuesday)...I'd look down at the paper over my Coco Pops and that familiar sinking feeling returned as I saw the Jets had lost again. Over the years I've seen a lot of hurt, screw ups and rubbish, but... ...when I see a Jet lift the VLT, nothing will compare. I've invested too much to ever give it away...hell, I've even recruited two new fans to the Jets (and yes, they are still my friends!)
Combine all of this with the fact that every US based team gets a bye week following playing overseas to adjust - it's incredibly unfair for the UK based team. The UK needs a league, not a team. A team does not, and will not work. On the bright side, there would never be a "suck for xx player" campaign again as the remaining teams would begin the draft process at pick #2. I also can't imagine a single American free agent (with a family) wanting to play there, being forced to leave his family and travel across the ocean on a weekly basis.
My question for UK fans? What is the TV coverage and are the ratings substantial. Are they at all comparable to soccer? I assume the NFL has checked over all of this and it's probably pretty good.
The ratings are nowhere near as high as soccer and the coverage is mainly on Sky Sports - Subscription required. They will need to get more coverage on free to view tv to substantially increase its audience.
A couple of points: We already have a league and it has been going since around 1985. There are around 50 teams in it and the national Governing Body suggests that 40,000 people play the game in various forms. If baseball players can leave their family for weeks at a time, I'm sure a football player can do it 8 times a year....
They are not comparable (although the Super Bowl gets around 30% of the FA Cup Final. It averages around 2 million a week. Therefore, the corporate sponsorship base is weaker, but the new market position is beyond belief (30 million people live within 90 minutes of Wembley)
Right now it looks like it would be a lower level sport in the UK like soccer is here. But the NFL wants big time numbers. Like another poster said just selling out Wembley eight times per season won't give them the kind of revenue they demand. I don't think they'll have any problem signing free agents esp if the moneys right. Like you say tremendous market potential.
I suspect the only way to make a london team work, logistically, is if we add a whole European division. At least that way, each team has 6 road games a year where they don't have to hop the pond. It also means more of those teams are playing more of the current teams more often (home and road games), which will help people accept them more quickly. Of course, this opens up several other cans-of-worms, like how diluting the talent pool by adding four teams; possibly moving some teams, or moving some and adding some; unbalanced conferences if one gets a new division and the other doesn't, etc, etc. But I think the idea of adding one team way out like that doesn't bode well. It would be hard enough if we tried to put a team in Alaska or Hawaii.
Not a 5 hour one.. No we dont. We had to wake at 930 in the morning to watch the last game out there...but thats a cool fact about the distance though i never woulda thought
BTW more power to you for staying with a sinking ship like this one. When you could have your choice of any franchise to root for. You could be like my kids just root for winners. Welcome to a lifetime of heartbreak.
Thank you pclfan...by the way I've already had a lifetime of woe with the Jets, from Kotite to the Butt Fumble and all because the first game I ever saw on TV was on September 21st, 1986 - the day we beat Miami 51-45 in OT. But I still love them just as much....
I went to an NFL owners meeting in London...they talked about franchise targets in LA, Mexico City, London and Tokyo all supplied through the normal US draft. The NFL could become the first truly global league...
I'm all for it. Maybe we have an AFC Europe and an NFC Asia for Conference Parity. Seems like if anybody could bankroll getting a handful of Concord jets up, running, and at the ready, it would be the NFL. Maybe just one for each new franchise, and they can bring in visiting teams or send their own team out.
