Why anyone still clinging onto the 39th game proposal should heed lesson of NFL's London leg

By Ian Winwood

Published 10:08 28/10/11

• 

Whenm in 2007, America’s National Football League first announced that it was coming to the United Kingdom, the league’s website was swamped with more than a million requests for tickets.

Since then, the most profitable sporting set-up in the world – remarkable given that American Football is the most popular sport in only one country – has each autumn set itself up at Wembley Stadium on a given Sunday in October.

Last Sunday saw the Chicago Bears square up against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The fixture counted as a home game for the Floridians, meaning that fans in Tampa lost one of the team’s eight home fixtures (excluding playoffs).

A universal truism is that Americans know how to do razzmatazz, how to sell the sizzle as well as the steak. And no part of American culture does this kind of thing as well as the NFL. Just have a look at the Super Bowl for evidence of this.

In the run up to this fifth annual gridiron game at the National Stadium, the league held court in Trafalgar Square. A huge stage was erected and a party was held on the Saturday before the game. The sell could hardly have been harder had Barack Obama rocked up and danced a tango with Lady Gaga.

Come the next day though and the evidence inside Wembley Stadium was that even the greatest money making machine in the sporting world had come unstuck, at least as when it came to this year’s overseas adventure.

An announced attendance of just over 76,000 paying customers – most of whom had, it must be said, paid handsomely for the privilege of seeing the game – meant that some 14,000 seats sat empty. In the stadium’s upper deck, black tarpaulin covered entire sections of vacant plastic perches.

The NFL is keen that within the next five to 10 years London has its own team. After Sunday’s display, League executives may be backpedalling on this idea at some speed.

I mention this in the hope that the English FA take note.

The difference between the NFL and the Premier League is that the English league has what is known in the US as a ‘balanced schedule’ – that is, each team plays every other team home and away.

Because fans will not tolerate losing one of their home games, the custodians of the English pastime are suggesting a ‘39th game’ to be played on foreign soil.

Also unlike the NFL, the Premier League is not really all that competitive – it is for a handful of sides, but not for the majority - any overseas game will need to feature at least one of only five or six clubs. Without them the idea will be dead in the water.

It ought, really, to be dead in the water already. Part of the appeal of following an overseas league is the fact that it takes place miles from your home, lending the sport a sense of the exotic.

Bring it to the doors of foreign audiences and, as the Americans this week found out, fans can quickly cool on the magic of it all.

And if the NFL has trouble selling its product then chances are the Premier League will encounter the same difficulties.

Leave things as they are – 38 games all taking place on domestic soil. The schedule of the Premier League is not broken, so it would shame for people to try and break it in pursuit of a notion as fanciful as world domination.

***

Read Ian Winwood exclusively on MirrorFootball every Friday

Fancy winning £3,000 for FREE this month? Play Mirror Football Streak for your chance to win cash prizes! Start predicting now!