By Ryan G. Murphy
Narrowly and muddily escaping the Miami Dolphins 13-10 as the slip-sliding guinea pig for NFL expansion is not even close to my idea of what NFL football should be. So if London is calling again, I’m not answering as a New York Giants fan.
English fans are extremely rooted in tradition. The backbone of European football is local loyalty – a family-like base of fans that bleed club colors. Can you imagine the uproar among those fans if a Premier League match were played in the United States for marketing purposes?
Even more drastic, can you imagine if a Premier League team moved across the country because it wasn’t making enough money?
The NFL is unapologetic about its desire to sell. That’s fine. I understand it’s a business and money needs to be made, but it irritates me that the NFL markets fan tradition so heavily and then tries to dilute it for money’s sake.
The NFL needed this game to be a 41-38, barn-burning overtime thriller. Instead it got 22 300-something pound men running after a funny shaped ball on a backyard slip and slide.
I heard the field needed to be zambonied at half time.
London fans were “treated to the traditional American-style razzmatazz before the game got underway” and “the players emerged to a hail of fireworks that momentarily turned Wembley into an apparent war-zone before the real action took centre stage…between the interminable breaks for television adverts.”
That was taken directly off the English Web site telegraph.uk.com.
So it seems that Londoners took away from this game that American football is about cheerleaders in short shorts, explosions and the opportunity to cash in. Minus the cheerleaders, that’s pretty accurate.
Any interest in this game from the English standpoint was strictly a curiosity issue. Two months from now, no one is going to remember this game.
According to 24.com, which covers, among other things, European sports, American football is, “essentially a series of violent collisions punctuated by occasional moments of breath-taking ability, American football has never been able to make much of an impression in England.”
Maybe this is because European fans simply don’t understand the game, but maybe this is because these fans see through the smokescreen of aggressive marketing and embrace maintaining tradition much more so than a flashy new product.
Marketing an American product in the typical, glitzy American way is not going to turn an English soccer fan onto the NFL, and, if aggressive expansion continues, will turn some NFL fans off to a league looking to dilute its own traditions.
