AS IT DOES every time an NFL game takes place at Wembley, discussion in both traditional media and social media has turned to talk of a London franchise and how ‘inevitable’ it is that England will have it’s own team within a decade.
Lost in the discussion – especially as commentators (especially those on host broadcasters) get caught up in the hype of an NFL weekend – are the potential problems with having a team based on this side of the Atlantic which makes a London franchise virtually impossible.
Here are four serious issues the NFL would have to overcome for any European based team to work.
1. Logistics
The NFL season is 17 weeks long. In that time teams must play 16 games, eight at home, eight away. Every team gets a bye week during the season and, for teams playing in London, it’s always the week after they travel over the Atlantic.
So how is it going to work when a London team has to travel to play the Seattle Seahawks. If that game happens to be the early kick off on a Sunday, the earliest the London team get to board a plane home – even a private charter – is approximately 7pm local time meaning they won’t land in London until around lunchtime on Monday, giving the other 31 teams a massive competitive advantage.
That’s bad enough, but imagine they were involved in the Monday/Sunday night game?
2. Changing teams
I support the worst team in the NFL – and, sadly, not just this season – in the Oakland Raiders and even if an NFL team moved to Dublin I wouldn’t consider switching allegiances.
While some fans probably could make the transition, part of what helps the NFL sell out Wembley is European fans travelling from Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, etc, most of them wearing their own team’s colours rather than those of the teams playing.
Could anyone with an existing team really get behind the ‘London Monarchs’ or whatever a UK-based team would be called?
3. Attracting players/staff and salary cap
Getting players to and from London on a weekly basis would be difficult enough, but imagine asking nearly 200 plus players and staff to move themselves and their families to a new country, a new culture with different currency, weather, tax laws, etc.
The only solution here is for any London team to have a higher salary cap and more draft picks than any other team but in a league designed to provide a level playing field for all teams, it’s difficult to see other owners agree to this move?
4. Los Angeles
This one came up in discussion with Kevin Cadle recently and he’s right, LA – as the second biggest TV market in the US – is in line for at least one if not two NFL teams before London gets a look in.
While there are no shortage of teams who would probably step forward for the move to Los Angeles – Raiders, Rams, Chargers – the only team ever mentioned in association with London is the Jaguars. Given the problems listed from one to three, it’s difficult to see anyone choosing the UK over LA.
Alternatives to a London team
NFL Europe
Redzone has been pushing for a revamped NFL Europe for over two years now and it’s still the best solution for a football fix on this side of the Atlantic, if run properly. Every other major US sports league has a feeder league, so why not the NFL?
Expand the season and number of international games
By dropping two weeks of pre-season, the NFL could expand to 19 weeks and ask teams to play 17 games with eight at home, eight away and one at an international site in London, Dublin, Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney, wherever. It also gives teams a second bye week to recover from their international game.
Continue with current format
The Wembley games work because the fans who travel treat them like an occasion, the way neutral fans treat the Super Bowl. However, if we continue to see such one-sided affairs the appetite for games in London could diminish.
Since it’s inception in 2008, the average winning margin in International Series games in Wembley is 15.1 points. In the six games held since 2012, the average winning margin is 19.3 points with just two of those games being less than two score wins (while three were 24+ point wins).
Conclusion
There’s no doubt there’s a demand for live NFL in Ireland, the UK and Europe but to just assume that equates to a viable European based team is too simplistic even if both the hosts and the league want it to happen.
Any one of the problems listed could be enough to put the kibosh on a potential London franchise on their own but, together, it makes it virtually unworkable long-term.
