NFL in Europe: the dream that will not die

It was a little more than 26 years ago that the St. Louis Cardinals (now in Arizona) defeated the Minnesota Vikings, 41-31, in the first NFL game ever played at London’s Wembley Stadium. Since then, numerous preseason and regular season games have been played in London, and earlier this week, the NFL confirmed that once again more games will be scheduled there in 2010.

The NFL has now played games in Toronto and London and Mexico. Obviously, the reason the league continues to do these out-of-country games is because they get a lot of money out of it. But it doesn’t make sense why they can’t just schedule those games inside the United States, in places like Omaha or Nebraska or Kentucky where there is no NFL team, and where they’d easily be able to produce a sellout.

The answer is that the NFL, like all the sports leagues, holds firmly onto the idea that one day, in the near future, they will be able to put a sports team in Europe. David Stern once went even farther and said he expected a whole European division in the NBA in less than a decade -- Stern said that a year-and-a-half ago. The dream is that by putting a team in Europe, you open yourself not only to a whole new country of potential fans, but a whole new continent as well.

Of course, there are many logistical problems involved that make putting a sports teams in Europe a dream. The biggest one, obviously, is air travel. No league could possibly expect the Seattle or San Francisco or Los Angeles teams to make regular trips to Wembley Stadium, and the ones that did would have to have some sort of incentive, like a bye.

The other problem is that the European dream, on the whole, is a total falacy. The NBA and NFL both want to believe that if you put a team in London or France, and because that team is the only one in the country, everyone will rally around that team and it’ll be instant sellouts every single game. But we know that’s not true. Look at the Toronto Raptors and Toronto Blue Jays and (when they existed) the Vancouver Grizzlies. Do we see instant sellouts for every single game? No, because just like American sports towns, Canadian sports towns have either fair weather fans or fans that just don’t care about basketball/football/baseball. Plus, when it comes to Canada and England, those sports are barely even on the radar compared to hockey and soccer -- in the NFL’s case, the idea that they could ever have a team in Europe is particularly absurd since American soccer means nothing over there.

Also, putting a team in another continent could have dire consequences for the respective league’s ratings. You think the San Antonio Spurs and Buffalo Bills are a bad draw? Just imagine if either of those teams played in London. There’s a reason why the Toronto Raptors are always near the bottom of the NBA in road attendance -- Americans just don’t care about foreign teams, and the same is probably true in Europe.

Instead of global expansion, what the leagues should really concentrate on is luring star players from foreign nations. Look at what we’ve seen from the Houston Rockets since they drafted Yao Ming -- they’ve basically become the sports liason between America and China and are easily the most popular basketball team, worldwide. Would having a team in China produce the same results? Possibly, but compared to the results had by just staying inside the United States, it’d likely be nothing to write home about.