London’s third and final NFL game of the season will be the 39th to be held in the city since 2007. And like many of the previous matchups, Sunday’s matinee at Wembley will be played between a couple of league bottom feeders in the New England Patriots and Jacksonville Jaguars.
But if local interest in the NFL can survive these dismal 1-5 teams, there are better days ahead for Britain’s growing number of gridiron football fans.
‘Before the end of this decade, there will be an NFL team established in London playing at Tottenham Hot Spurs Stadium,’ top expert Dennis Deninger tells DailyMail.com. ‘And within five years after that, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will host the Super Bowl.’
An award-winning former producer at ESPN with decades of experience in sports media, Deninger is not guessing here. He’s a professor emeritus at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communications and with his latest book, ‘The Football Game That Changed America,’ he traces the history and social impact of the Super Bowl.
Now, with the NFL claiming to generate more than £300 million ($389m) annually for London’s economy, Deninger, the league, and local politicians are all envisioning the financial impact of Britain’s very own team over a full season.
Fans arrive for the Jacksonville Jaguars at Chicago Bears NFL International Series game
Ex-ESPN producer Dennis Deninger (right) sees a Super Bowl in London by 2035
UK National Anthem sung by Florence Rawlings before an NFL football game on October 6
The NFL has mulled expanding into London for years, intermittently shooting down the idea of moving the Jaguars or other floundering teams to the city. And as Deninger and others agree, an expansion franchise would make more sense, given the billions in fees that the league could charge for a new team.
With the potential for expansion in mind, the NFL set a benchmark for itself in 2015, declaring that the league would need 6 million ‘avid fans’ in the UK before considering a franchise in London. At the time, fan surveys revealed the presence of about 4 million avid fans in the country, but the league expected to cross the 6 million threshold by 2020.
‘The fan base is big enough and passionate enough that it can support a franchise,’ NFL spokesman Mark Waller said in January of 2016. ‘I felt in 2007 it was always a 15-year journey. I think we’re on track to deliver that. I fundamentally believe we will deliver that.’
Prince William throws the pigskin during a flag football event in London on Tuesday
Performer Central Cee (left) and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell pose for a photo ahead of the NFL International match at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
The London Games have certainly helped to build that fan base.
Averaging three matchups a year dating back to 2013, the games have sold extremely well across the region, with 22 percent of attendees coming from London and another 60 percent from elsewhere in Britain.
Furthermore, international media deals with DAZN and Amazon Prime have allowed other Europeans to catch the action without buying a ticket.
‘They want global impact and they want worldwide media coverage,’ Deninger said, adding that the NFL wants to become part of Britain’s ‘entertainment spectrum.’
Naturally the Super Bowl – an event watched by hundreds of millions of people worldwide – would fit nicely with that plan.
But while NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is admittedly open to the idea of playing a Super Bowl overseas, he’s squeamish about awarding the game to a non-league city.
‘We’ve always traditionally tried to play a Super Bowl in an NFL city — that was always sort of a reward for the cities that have NFL franchises,’ he said last week in response to a question about moving the neutral-site game to a foreign venue.
Bears punter Tory Taylor (right) poses with Tottenham Hotspur coach Ange Postecoglou
But as Deninger explained, that’s exactly where Tottenham Hotspur Stadium comes in.
Completed in 2019, the facility was built specifically to hold both EPL and NFL teams, both of which are traditionally picky about their playing surfaces.
So to avoid this problem, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was constructed with two interchangeable fields: one hybrid grass pitch for soccer and artificial turf for football.
And in the event that the Spurs’ pitch is damaged during the transition from one sport to another, the stadium also boasts the world’s first integrated grow lighting system to help repair and restore any divots.
The bottom line is: Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is perfectly equipped to handle both the Spurs and a presence of a London-based NFL team – and that opens to the door to expansion and a London Super Bowl.
‘Follow the pattern,’ Deninger said. ‘You build a big, new stadium, you’ve got a great new audience, you get awarded a Super Bowl. Any NFL owner who builds a new stadium is very, very likely to get a Super Bowl within five years.’
The pattern, as Deninger pointed out, is fairly straightforward. Super Bowls in recent years have been awarded to cities that invest billions in building NFL stadiums. In February it was Las Vegas’ four-year-old Allegiant Stadium. In 2022, it was the two-year-old SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
In fact, of the nine newest NFL stadiums, Minneapolis’ US Bank Stadium is the only one that has not hosted a Super Bowl, and that has everything to do with the region’s frigid climate.
London, on the other hand, has a famously moderate climate, even if it is a little damp.
British fans get into NFL fandom by making their own ‘defense’ signs for Sunday’s game
Admittedly, there are still some obstacles facing NFL expansion into London – namely, the time zone and travel concerns.
London and New York are an eight-hour flight from each other, while a trip from Los Angeles to the UK capital can last around half a day. That’s remarkably more than the NFL’s current longest travel distance between Seattle and Miami, which is around six hours.
But in this case, the NFL could be rescued by the next generation of supersonic air travel.
Although the Concord is no longer in use, companies like Boom Technologies of Englewood, Colorado are expected to have commercially viable supersonic aircraft in use by the end of this decade. And that means the once eight-hour flight from New York to London could drop below four hours.
‘Technology always leads when people with creative minds step in and they use technology to its fullest,’ Deninger said.
Then there is the London time zone, which is five hours ahead of New York and eight hours ahead of Los Angeles.
Green Bay Packers fans donning their famed cheese hats head into a game in London
New York Jets’ Aaron Rodgers after a recent game at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
But as Deninger is quick to point out, the issue may not be too difficult for fans to overcome. A regular-season game or Super Bowl being played at 9pm in London would start at 1pm in LA, where fans are already accustomed to watching football in the early afternoons.
The bigger problem with the time difference will impact players, who will be fighting severe jet lag unless the league can find a way to mitigate travel issues.
One difference between American and British NFL fans is the way they pronounce ‘Jaguars’
For starters, teams traveling to London might need to leave earlier in the week to allow players more to adjust. Similarly, a London team would likely need to find practice facilities to use in the US in the week before any road game.
As for holding a Super Bowl in London, Goodell will need to make that case to team owners, many of whom have been denied that opportunity.
The solution, as Deninger sees it, is to funnel a larger portion of the expansion franchise’s entrance fee to such teams.
”’You owners who have not hosted a Super Bowl, you’re gonna get a larger share,”’ Deninger said, speaking as if he were Goodell. ‘You know, they could prorate it.’
The question of who would buy a London team seems lees daunting and Deninger doesn’t envision there being any shortage of demand. Case in point: the Washington Commanders set a US record by selling for more than $6 billion last year, and that wasn’t an anomaly.
The best case scenario, Deninger explained, is for a local billionaire to buy the expansion franchise and give it a British identity rather than trying to borrow one from America.
‘You want a British owner, a long-time person with history of sport in the United Kingdom, to own that team because then they will be able to establish the kind of tribal identities,’ Deninger said. ‘This is how we take pride in the success and the efforts of our team and how we identify each other.’
An overall, interior, general view during the singing of the national anthems before the game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Chicago Bears at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
Just one decade ago, the potential for an NFL team in London seemed farfetched. Even after playing three games a year in the city for more than a decade, the logistical issues can feel overwhelming.
But if the NFL has proven anything, it’s that demand is king. For all of the league’s scandals and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NFL continues to set new records for profits and viewership.
Simply put, travel issues, sleepy players, and a 142-year-old Tottenham Hotspur are small obstacles for a league that boasted 93 of the 100 most-watched US television broadcasters of 2023.
‘The NFL is run by a lot of very smart people,’ Deninger said. ‘ I know a number of them and they can see the future, see what works.’
And by turning national NFL stars into international celebrities, as Travis Kelce has done by virtue of his relationship with Taylor Swift, the league can transform itself from a curiosity in the UK to a seasonal fixture of local life.
‘The NFL would love for a number of their players to become these international celebrities who attract audiences no matter where they play,’ Deninger said.
