LONDON – One of the big storylines this weekend was the chatter about the possibility that the NFL would put a team in London.

 

The discussion generated plenty of excitement during Bob Kraft's chat with the media at the Oval, when he speculated that London could be home to an NFL franchise within 10 years. It sounds great, it’s very encouraging for us NFL fans in Europe, it's exactly the sort of progressive thinking you love to hear from the NFL, and it certainly set the British press into a spin.

 

But it also raises some interesting questions.

Previously, the league had hinted at the possibility of a Super Bowl in London, but that was simply an attention-getter. Unless the NFL and the networks were willing to sacrifice audience and start the game at 1 p.m. or maybe 2 p.m. Eastern time (6 p.m. or 7 p.m. in London) the idea will never work.

 

Think about it: your typical Super Bowl kickoff at 6:25 p.m. Eastern would be 11:25 p.m. in London ... meaning the public transportation infrastructure, which actually shuts down earlier on Sundays, would have to remain open virtually all night. The police would object to 80,000 fans walking around the streets at 4 a.m., and the neighbors wouldn't like it either.

American constituencies would complain too: media and sponsors wouldn't like the extra cost and logistical problems. And the players, no matter how much time they'd have to acclimate, would be unlikely to enjoy a kickoff just before midnight.

The league itself seems to think it’s not worth the effort. And in an interview with Boston television this weekend, commissioner Roger Goodell dismissed the talk of a Super Bowl in London and said that a team or teams in Europe is a more likely scenario.

On the surface, the regular season looks more practical: and the NFL would be breaking ground in the international sporting world; soccer refuses to allow cross-country pollination of national leagues, or else there'd be a Premier League team in Dublin right now.

 

London kickoffs at 1 p.m. ET (6 p.m. local time) would fit the second-game broadcast schedule. The actual trip, at least for East Coast teams, isn't that much different than traveling to San Diego. And having shown they can fill Wembley for games, we know there is a considerable audience of hard-core fans out there.

But the Cold Hard Football Facts suggest that this may be an optimistic scenario. Filling the stadium once or twice a year is one thing, filling it eight times (plus exhibition games) is another. That hard-core audience probably numbers between 500,000-800,000 fans, a city like Jacksonville but spread out across a country. Many, if not most of them, have already chosen NFL teams to support, and, as we saw in NFL Europe, and we don't know if they'd switch to the new “home” team.

 

I put home in quotation marks because it's not a done deal that fans outside London would automatically transfer their allegiance to a team called the London Broils, or whether Scots or Welsh would flock to one called the English Muffins.

Plus ticket prices, which help make the international series profitable even for the teams that give up their home game, would have to be put more roughly in line with those of, say, Premier League soccer: you can't run an NFL franchise hoping to attract 50,000 different people to each of your home games. And, although network TV money is out there, you'd need a TV deal for your team that was outside the network remit.

Still, if anyone could overcome those problems, the NFL and its marketing muscle should be able to do it. And unlike, say, the NBA, who once considered overseas expansion, the NFL wouldn't be constrained by having to work with existing pro leagues.

But practical problems abound. Where would the players live? They aren't likely to move to London permanently, especially with non-guaranteed contracts, and would they want to spend August through December either moving their families or living away from them? What about the off-season? Presumably the team would have to maintain an office, and facility, in the US for its workouts, for its scouting and drafting operations, for mini-camps.

Travel to and from the West Coast is problematic. A London team would make two-week road trips, and West Coast teams could play an East Coast game before the London trip. But that makes scheduling a nightmare, and vastly increases travel costs. Having a second European team would help, and Germany has a similar fan base to Britain, plus a more advanced amateur league, but now we're doubling the problem.

In reality, American football remains a spectacle, not a sport, in the UK. Much as creating a team on the other side of the ocean would be a daring move by the NFL, we've already seen, when NFL Europe was closed in favor of the international series, that the league considers the spectacle the best way of exposing the sport internationally.

 

The problem is, with each passing year of success at Wembley, the spectacle becomes less exotic. It's great to stretch (and think) outside the lines, but unless you've got two feet in bounds, the pass goes incomplete.