Wembley success may lead NFL to double games in Britain as early as next year 27/10/2009 |
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The NFL may play two regular-season games in Britain as soon as next year. The development came after a positive reaction among NFL executives and owners to the New England Patriots’ 35-7 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Wembley on Sunday – the third game in the league's annual “International Series”.
The game attracted a sell-out crowd of 84,254, and the NFL is ready to take the next logical step in testing the potential of the UK market by finding out either next year or in 2011 whether there is sufficient appetite for their product to justify a second fixture. The NFL has not ruled out four games a year at some point or even a London-based franchise.
“I think there’s a decent chance [that it will be 2010],” Alistair Kirkwood, the managing director of NFL UK, said. “The key thing is to get the owners of the two prospective home teams to agree. I’d like to think we’ll begin serious discussions in November and be able to make an announcement in December. It will either be in 2010 or 2011."
A further decision will be made whether to stage both games at Wembley or to take the extra game either to Murrayfield, Edinburgh, or the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. While Wembley has proved that it can host the NFL, a new venue will almost certainly help to stimulate extra interest – an important consideration with extra tickets to sell.
The debriefing after Sunday’s game will already have started in preparation for next year’s game or games. “We will look at every area we can improve on,” Kirkwood said. “We will listen to owners of other teams who were here, fans, staff from the New York HQ, and we’ll take all of that in. I’m happy and relieved about where we’re at but we’ve got a lot of work to do over the coming weeks to learn from this and build on it.
“As we look to the future we need to be able to encourage owners of other teams to come over, and so it’s important that Tom Brady [the Patriots quarterback] was so warm about the experience in his press conference, and Bill Belichick, the Patriots’ head coach said that it was a positive experience. You know he wasn’t forced into saying it, because that’s not the sort of thing that he would do.”
Although doubts have been expressed about the NFL’s ability to capture more of its share of the British market than that represented by the present number of loyalists, there are signs of a growth in interest. Television figures for games shown on Sky and Channel 5 are up, while the make-up of the crowd at Wembley suggests that a young audience is being attracted as well as those in their forties and fifties who started watching when the sport was shown on Channel 4 in 1984. Kirkwood suggested that the skeptics in the media have an outdated conception of the NFL audience.
“News editors are often of a certain age, but a lot of our efforts have been aimed at reaching out to a younger generation,” he said. “It is a different media world that we’re in. When we were at our most popular before, there were only four TV channels, television ended before midnight and very little sport was on TV. This time round we’ve grown an awful lot of fans very quickly, and the digital media allow them to interact in ways they weren’t able to 25 years ago.
“This year for the first time on 15 years we have a daytime programme on terrestrial TV, at 10am on Saturday on Channel Five, we’ve got a programme that’s dedicated to acquiring new fans. We have a new website, nfluk.com/360 that helps new fans pick a team and explains the rules.
“Having regular-season games here takes it to a different level. If it all doesn’t work out, then it’s egg on everybody’s collective face. Pre-season games at Wembley in the 1980s were a reaction to the phenomenonal interest generated by the Channel 4 coverage, whereas now the risk and the reward are both much more intense.
“We’re leading on the sporting excellence rather than the razzmatazz, the attempt to build credibility as a top-class sport. And it takes time. You can’t do that over a 12 or 24-month period. It would be fair to say that the jury is out on where this actually goes, but if it is a truly neutral jury, I think it would have to say that we have come an awfully long way in three years.”
(Source: Timesonline.co.uk)
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