If you didn’t already know, the “NFL goes to Europe” campaign has been a failure, most recently with the San Francisco Giants and Denver Broncos at Wembley Stadium in London this month. Also, if you didn’t know that, shame on you for not reading my blog. Even at the fourth attempt at increasing American football’s popularity across the pond, the games are more like a carnival attraction than a sporting event. The sport just doesn’t translate in Europe, but why?
In the early 1990s, American sports executives saw the technological, cultural and most economic potential of globalizing their sport. This happened with the NFL, NBA and the NHL and MLB to some degree. Two decades later, there has been little success. What those executives didn’t expect was the boomerang effect. For example, while basketball was being pushed in Beijing and American football in Great Britain, soccer became popular in America and wealthy American investors started putting capital into English clubs like Manchester United, Aston Villa and Liverpool. Malcolm Glazer and his family, who own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL team, have controlling stake in United. Randy Lerner owns the Cleveland Browns NFL team (who knows why?) and Villa. John Henry and Tom Werner own the Boston Red Sox MLB team and Liverpool.
The rise of American stake in European football has counteracted the globalization of their own sports. NFL Europa, an experiment to export America’s most passionate pastime overseas, ended in 2007 after a 15-year struggle to make a profit. When you hear that the Super Bowl is “the greatest show on Earth,” don’t believe it. An annual survey by Initiative Futures Sports and Entertainment showed the 2009 Super Bowl was beaten by many other sporting events like the Champions League final. The World Cup and Olympics regularly beat the Super Bowl. A global audience of 162 million tuned into last year’s Super Bowl, but you can’t really call it global when the majority of viewers were in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Don’t expect American football to reach much past North America.