The NFL will hold its first ever regular season game in Europe tomorrow when the Giants and Dolphins meet at Wembley Stadium in London. Michael Silver at Yahoo! Sports has a related puff piece on how brilliant and innovative the NFL's marketing plan is. And what does this innovative, brilliant plan entail? Apparently, realizing there is, in fact, a rest of the world.
One doesn't expect the latest attempt by the NFL to get anyone other than bloodthirsty Americans to watch their damn game to be any more successful than the previous tries, but that won't stop the league and its fawning legion of sportswriter lackeys from regaling us with tales of milk and honey in the promised land. Here is Silver in a particularly grand moment of hubris
Sunday's game at Wembley Stadium between the New York Giants and Miami Dolphins is only the beginning, the equivalent of the Beatles' 1964 foray to the States that spawned the British Invasion.They'll welcome us with tea and scones! "What is this game you call Foot Ball, and why have we never heard of it before!" The goalposts are already on their way, to be set up at Old Trafford and Stanford Bridge by the end of the month!
Waller here is obliquely referring to the NFL's failed venture to create a developmental league called NFL Europe which was finally scrapped last year after 15 forgettable seasons. At the bitter end, NFL Europe had five of its six teams in Germany, the only country where it could sustain a modicum of interest. He is trying to convince us that the failure of the NFL's international expansion has been due to not sending out NFL-quality product. We will have to remind him that this has not stopped the much more successful export programs of baseball and, particularly, basketball, because no one else, least of all Silver, is going to point this out.You'd might as well start calling it the IFL, because it's becoming increasingly clear that the new national pastime is no longer ours to hoard.
"If you want to grow something, you've got to share it," Mark Waller, the NFL's senior vice president of sales and marketing, said Thursday during a break in the conference. "Once this takes root here, and it will, people are going to expect to see the best, in the same way that you know the World Cup is the ultimate for soccer and the Olympics is the ultimate for track and other sports. If (the Super Bowl) travels, it makes you part of what the world is today, which is truly a global community.
Silver, in fact, wants to go for the whole cow and send the Super Bowl itself overseas. After all, since ordinary fans can't attend the game anyway, who cares where it's held?
Usually, adopting a tone other than Voice of the Proles is forbidden territory for sportswriters. But this is the NFL we're talking about here, and some things just take precedence. The proles must submit themselves to the Greater Good of the NFL's bottom line. (I will, for now, avoid the appallingly vile first half of that paragraph which I didn't blockquote, which deserves its own book.)
Another argument against going overseas is that the Super Bowl draws working-class fans of the competing teams, and they won't be able to afford a trip to London. That may be true for some fans, but not most of the people I see during Super Bowl week, who are paying $500 or more per ticket and seem to have plenty of disposable income. This isn't George Mason reaching the Final Four and a bunch of starving students hopping on Greyhounds; the typical Super Bowl fan, in my anecdotal experience, tends to be Joe from Sales on a company-approved junket, and he'll probably fly to London as readily as he will to Phoenix.
The NFL is less secure as the dominant player in American sports than people realize. Major League Baseball is close to catching the NFL in total revenue, something unthinkable just a few years ago. It has two major problems going forward; the absence of global expansion being one. The other is being tied to the medium of sit-on-your-ass television that is becoming slowly obsolescent. Football came in with the uniquely late-20th-century ubiquity of television and its promise of allowing ordinary folks to see every game their team played with a modest expenditure of effort. It will go out with the exploding accessibility of wireless internet, satellite radio, and digital video recording.
And because only violence-crazed Americans want any part of it.
