NFL: Franchise in London is a very bad idea

NFL International Series 2009: New England Patriots @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Ever since the inaugural International Series game was held at Wembley in 2007, the NFL has slowly crept towards the idea of placing a franchise permanently in London. Through the years, this idea has grown, and now that League Commissioner Roger Goodell and influential NFL owners like New England’s Robert Kraft are firmly behind it, it is becoming a more and more realistic possibility.

However, realistically, this plan is destined for disaster. There are a plethora of problems associated with relocating a team outside the United States that aren’t going to go away no matter how carefully the League plans it. Some of these problems stem from legal and economic differences. The tax laws in the US and UK vary greatly, but both would apply to a UK-based NFL Franchise; the UK operates in pounds and the US in Dollars, which would play havoc with the League’s carefully constructed salary cap; UK/EU Law might not co-exist with the NFL’s Conditional Bargaining Agreement, which is the legal contract between the League and the players association.

I won’t bore you with the details. These complex problems belong to a more political forum than this one. However, there are a number of other problems rooted in the more obvious aspects of the proposal that warrant our attention.

If the NFL creates an expansion franchise, everything about that team will be brand new, including the fan-base. The question must then be asked; where will these fans come from? Presumably, the answer to that is that it will come from the existing NFL fan-base in the UK. But is that a reasonable expectation?

US Comedian Bill Mayer once joked that “Men are only as loyal as their options”. Whilst that may be true when it comes to your partner, once you reach a certain age, a fan doesn’t even consider changing allegiance in sport, no matter what the other options are.

Most fans in the UK and Europe have already chosen their NFL team. With geography not playing a huge role, they have done it in a similar way to Asian and African soccer fans choosing a team to support in the major European Leagues. Some will have done it by jersey colour (why else would you support the Vikings?), others just by which exciting team they saw on TV. It doesn’t really matter how it happened. What matters is that they have picked up the banner, and they won’t put it down just because a team emerges in the UK. They aren’t as fickle as that.

One major problem to a London Franchise is that UK NFL Fans are very loyal to their teams

One major problem for a potential London Franchise is that UK NFL Fans are very loyal to their teams. Getting them to switch allegiance will not be easy.

A few weeks ago I asked a number of UK-based NFL fans about how they would view a new team, to gain a sense of the prevailing opinion from the proposed team’s target audience. What I discovered confirmed my theory.

Every single person I asked said they would take an interest in the expansion franchise only as their ‘B’ or 2nd team. None of them would choose to support the expansion franchise above their current NFL team, nor would they support them in a game where it was in their supported team’s interest for the expansion franchise to lose.

This is a problem. A franchise without a loyal fan-base is a far from ideal situation for any up-start team in the UK. Players would find it difficult to find the motivation to play hard for a team without any real support. Even worse, there would be potentially fatal problems with attendances. It is a very real concern that fans who aren’t strongly attached to the team will not be committed enough to attend games on a regular basis. With that in mind, I went on to ask the fans just how many games they would attend per season.

What I discovered was that not a single fan said they would buy a season ticket for a London franchise. 40% stated that they would pick the best one or two match-ups on the schedule and try to go to those games. The remaining 60% said that they would attend “as many games as possible”, although those who elaborated on that suggested that would only amount to perhaps as few as 2 and no more than 4 games in a season.

Those figures are worrying for any future London Franchise. While it is true that the International Series Games in London generally sell out the capacity 80,000 seats at Wembley, that is only because there are only 1 or 2 games per season. It’s not hard to sell out something considered to be a ‘special event’. We simply do not know whether that level of attendance could be sustained for 8 games over multiple years.

Based on these figures, we can guess that it won’t be. A lot of the reluctance from a fan standpoint appears to be financial. People will not or cannot pay vast amounts of money to watch 8 games in a season, especially for a team that they do not support themselves. Add to that the probability of multiple losing seasons in the Franchise’s infancy, and the cost of travelling from around the UK to stay in London for the weekend, and doubts start to merge about the chances of sustaining a 50,000+ crowd beyond the novelty of the first season.

Perhaps, though, this is an overcomeable problem. If the team was introduced slowly, and not until a decade or so in the future when NFL popularity in the UK (which has risen exponentially in the last 5 years) has boomed even further, sufficient support could be harnessed for a London team.

The league, however, can’t overcome the amount of time that would be spent travelling to road games. No matter how hard you try, you cannot push Great Britain and North America closer together. The Atlantic Ocean is in the way. Unless Concorde is brought back or somebody invents a teleportation device, the travel time between the UK and the US is going to be a serious barrier to any movement to put a permanent franchise in London.

Currently, the longest flight that any NFL team has to take for a road game is Seattle to Miami. That is a 5 and a half hour plane ride. Travelling between Seattle and Boston is the next longest flight at just under 5 and a half hours.

Currently, the longest flight that any NFL team has to take for a road game is Seattle (top left) to Miami (bottom right)

Currently, the longest flight that any NFL team has to take for a road game is Seattle (top left) to Miami (bottom right)If London were awarded an NFL Franchise, the time that team would spend in the air would often be significantly more than that. Consider, for instance, the teams of the NFL’s Western divisions. Those are the San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, Arizona Cardinals, St Louis Rams, Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos.

In the NFC West, travelling from London to San Francisco takes 12 hours by air. It also crosses 8 different time zones, which is double the amount crossed by travelling from coast to coast in mainland USA. London to Seattle also crosses 8 time zones, and takes 9 hours by air. London to Phoenix is 10 and a half hours, and St Louis is 8 and a half hours. In the AFC West, San Diego from London takes 11 and a half hours, while Denver and Kansas City are both 9 hours flights from London too.

It’s unfair of the League to ask that of the players either of the expansion franchise or the teams located back in the western United States. It’s not fair to ask a team to travel that many hours, cross 7 or 8 different time zones, play a game, and then make the same trip back. And then play a game right after you get back as well. The jet lag involved would make it physically draining to make those trips, and the team’s play would suffer as a consequence.

The expansion team would have to make at least 8 trips across the pond every year (10 if you count pre-season games), and the odds are at least 3 or 4 of those games would be in central or western USA, meaning an 8 hour+ flight. You only get one bye week in any given season, so it is impossible to allow the UK Franchise sufficient time to recuperate after making those road trips. Maybe every team making the trip to London could have their bye week scheduled for the week after that game, but even that would be a big change to the current way of doing things, and barely feasible itself.

Even if you could somehow work around the schedule and the ridiculous hours spent in the air on road trips, the NFL then hits another hurdle; there isn’t a venue for the London team to play in.

The current venue for the International Series, London’s Wembley Stadium, is used for so many other events that there is next to no chance that it would be available for all 8 home games in the NFL regular season calendar.

As the league schedule runs from September to December, clashes with the English Premier League will prevent the NFL using any of the London–based Premier League venues as well. Even if it didn’t clash, it is doubtful that the NFL would persuade any of the London football clubs to ground share with them, considering the cut-up state of the Wembley surface after each NFL International Series Game.

Twickenham may be a possible venue, but even that will clash with international Rugby events. The only other option would be building a new stadium, which would take an enormous amount of funding. Given the fragility of London’s financial situation following the Olympic Games, they won’t be in a position to help and probably wouldn’t even want to considering that the NFL is a foreign league.

That means the team would have to look at private funding. As things stand right now, spending hundreds of millions of pounds on constructing a new stadium for a team whose success and popularity are far from certain doesn’t exactly sound like a financially sound investment.

But let’s say for arguments sake that the team somehow finds the funding, builds a stadium and makes the move to London. Even then, its struggles are far from over. How are they going to build the team? This could be the straw that breaks the Camel’s back.

When Free Agency opens each year, there are usually at least a dozen high calibre players who receive offers from all over the NFL as teams jostle for supremacy. With so many offers on the table, how many of these targeted players are going to want to go to rainy London over San Francisco or Miami? How many would give up the chance of playing for a storied franchise like Dallas to play for a team without a loyal fan base on another Continent?

There are probably some players who would be excited to try it. But for every player that would be receptive to moving to Britain to play, there would be countless more that wouldn’t want to go. That applies to rookies in the NFL Draft too. We could end up seeing a number of players taking the position Eli Manning took when the San Diego Chargers drafted him in 2004, refusing to play for the team and demanding a trade.

It is difficult enough for an expansion franchise to become competitive, but it will be immeasurably harder if their top prospects refuse to play for them. The roster might end up being filled by desperate free agents that didn’t get an offer anywhere else. Maybe a 45 year old Terrell Owens could play for them, being thrown to by 300lb all-time draft bust JaMarcus Russell.

The bottom line is that there are too many problems in the way to make London a viable option for the NFL. Even if fan support can be harnessed, attendances could be kept up and NFL players could be convinced to play for them (which are all unlikely), the logistics of the move make it impossible to put a franchise there. There are too many better markets left in North America that would be much safer to tap into than London. Cities such as Los Angeles, Sacramento and Toronto stand as ready-made franchise hosts without the logistical nightmare that the NFL would have to suffer through with London.

So Commissioner Goodell, feel free to keep up the International Series in the UK. Why not even give us a Superbowl? Just don’t give us a Franchise of our own. It will never work.