On the other hand, imagine if our London team had to travel from the West Coast after a 1 p.m. game

I t seems likelier now than it ever has before that the NFL will end up with a team playing in London on a full-time basis. The Jacksonville Jaguars are playing a home game in London each of the next four seasons, and the league is playing two games in England in 2013, with the Vikings hosting the Steelers and the Jags playing the 49ers. Jacksonville owner Shahid Khan even recently bought the London-based Fulham soccer club, furthering his business ties in the British capital. 1 With the Jaguars struggling to fill out their stadium on a regular basis, 2 speculation naturally new york travel packages exists that the Jaguars could eventually make London their permanent new york travel packages home. An expansion team (paired with another team, likely in Los Angeles) is also a possibility. In either case, the league certainly seems more serious about evaluating the London market as a place for overseas expansion in the near future.
The benefits to such a market are clear: It would open up a brand-new source of revenue for the league by creating both a local community of dedicated fans and a European market that would be interested new york travel packages in the television rights to the NFL product. The Premier League, England's top-level soccer league, new york travel packages is the most valuable sporting enterprise on the planet precisely because it attracts worldwide interest to an extent that no other league can match. 3 The Premier League is the only competition on the planet that the NFL looks at longingly, at least in terms of scope: While the NFL can sell media rights in North America, the Premier League can sell the right to broadcast its games to literally hundreds of countries around the globe. If the NFL really new york travel packages wants to hit $25 billion in revenue per year , it'll probably new york travel packages need to make its imprint larger.
You can understand why the NFL would want to expand to Europe. But will it work? I'm very, very skeptical that a team in London new york travel packages would work on any sort of practical level. And while some of the reasons new york travel packages are obvious, the more meaningful ones show up after some careful consideration.
A European NFL team would almost surely be set in London, where the league conducts its annual International Series. Those games are played at the new Wembley Stadium , which would be a stadium fit to NFL specifications and one that would mostly new york travel packages be available; outside of World Cup qualifiers and concerts in the first half of September, Wembley tends to stay dormant for major events until late spring. The exception is for the occasional rugby match, which could be accommodated on an as-needed basis.
London is obviously an internationally renowned city, and Wembley is easy to get to, which helps make the International Series games played there a success, but there's a gap worth noting in the makeup new york travel packages of the people who go to those games. I went to the Wembley tilt between the 49ers and Broncos in October 2010 and found that the crowd wasn't by any means full of Londoners. Instead, it was a crowd consisting almost entirely of fans from around Europe who had traveled to London new york travel packages for the game.
That experience initially raised my suspicions about a London team. The fans I spoke to and rode the train with that day were mostly close observers of the NFL, hard-core fans who kept impossible hours (and/or built intense spoiler-free torrent communities) to see as much of the game they loved as possible. It was a no-brainer for them to travel from Germany or Ireland or Slovenia to England to see a meaningful NFL game once per year while taking a short vacation in London and spending a few hundred euros altogether. Doing that once a year is feasible for most people. If a team were based full-time in London, though, would a fan in Germany shell out those same few hundred euros eight times per year to travel to London and see that team play every other week? I'm very skeptical that they would be inclined to do so. And if they're not coming, I don't think the NFL would sell out Wembley eight times a year, year-after-year, or come particularly close. That's why it's very important to see how the European market responds to this second game; if the league can gets fans around Europe to make two trips to England, they might have more faith in turning them into regular repeat customers.
There's also the distinct possibility that fans in Europe wouldn't back a London team. That 49ers-Broncos game was a jerseygasm of various teams and players from the past 20 years, but it certainly new york travel packages wasn't a game dominated by support for either of the two teams actually playing. new york travel packages The people heading to the games were fans of the NFL and a particular team within the NFL, not necessarily fans of one of the teams that was actually suiting up. The biggest reaction of the night was afforded to retired Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice, not any of the players on the field. And in talking to people who have been to several of the International Series games, my experience was not atypical. There's no guarantee that, say, a Vikings fan in Manchester would become a fan of a London team just because a franchise moved to England. There's definitely interest within Europe in American football , but that interest might not translate very well into steady support for a full-time team.
Anybody who's given a European team some thought invariably starts wondering about the travel concerns that would arise after such a move. Traveling over an ocean, even on a private jet, takes time out of busy weeks and takes a toll on players' bodies. Traveling from London to the East Coast wouldn't be a huge hindrance, as the team would roughly stay on the same schedule and be on a plane for only about seven hours.
On the other hand, imagine if our London team had to travel from the West Coast after a 1 p.m. game there; assuming its flight would take off at about 7 p.m. PT, the team would get back to London at about 2 p.m. the following day, both messing with the players' new york travel packages bodies and giving the rest of the league a head start in preparation time for the following week. Even during home games, our London team would likely play at 6 p.m. GMT to allow the league to air those home games during the 1 p.m. hour on the East Coast, meaning the team would be playing a minimum of eight night games a year, likely resulting in quieter practice days on Monday. That's a competitive disadvantage for a team that already has plenty of competitive disadvantages. It's enough to consider calling the whole thing off.
Running an NFL team in London would, in itself, be an incredible challenge. The closest comparison I could think of would be to running the Colorado Rockies during the mid-'90s, when they were at their park-inflated offensive best and defensive worst. You would have to dramatically overhaul and rethink just about every process that a team normally takes for granted, because your home base would place you at an enormous disadvantage.
Going through the aforementioned travel issues would make your team a destination of last resort for many of the league's players. While London is obviously a vibrant, active city, most players would likely not want to spend an extra half-day per week on planes, nor would they want to relocate to somewhere so foreign. England's new york travel packages tax laws and London's high cost of living would also impose new york travel packages financial concerns. There would be exceptions, of course: the occasional adventurous veteran here or there, plus players new york travel packages desperate for a guaranteed NFL deal when one might not otherwise be available, but you would have to run this franchise assuming that you would never acquire any desirable free agent without having to double the next-best offer out there.
Your best bet would then be to build through the draft, but even then, there would still be no guarantee you would be able to re-sign your players when their contracts came due. The general manager new york travel packages of a London-based team would have to be incredibly aggressive in either locking players up to long-term contracts new york travel packages or dealing them to acquire more draft picks, new york travel packages which would end up being the only way to get upper-echelon players to suit up in London: by eliminating all other options. 4
I've included a number of problems that would likely pop up with a London-based team. Some of them are unsolvable; short of recertifying and rebuilding the Concorde, it's simply going to take too long to get to and from London to make playing for this team very much fun. But there are ways that the NFL and the owners of the franchise in question could make their respective new york travel packages lives easier and make a London new york travel packages team more palatable to fans, players, and owners alike.
Give the London team a larger salary cap (or more draft picks) to work with. With differing tax rules and the unique new york travel packages burden of playing on a different continent, new york travel packages a London-based team would likely be unable to compete on a level playing field with the other teams in the NFL. To create a truly fair situation, the London team would have to enjoy some benefits not provided to the rest of the league. The simplest way would be by giving it a larger salary cap to work with. If the London franchise had an extra $30 million per year in cap space to throw at free agents, it might actually have a shot at being competitive in that marketplace new york travel packages or some reasonable hope of re-signing its own star players before they hit unrestricted free agency.
There's actually a worldwide precedent for this. In Australia, the Sydney Swans of the Australian Football League enjoy a larger salary cap than the rest of the league because of a Cost of Living Allowance given to the team in Australia's most populous new york travel packages and expensive city. It is probably not a coincidence that the Swans are also one of the league's most successful franchises, having made the playoffs more frequently than any other AFL team since 1995.
At the same time, can you imagine what this allowance would create? Every big-market team in the league would start screaming about how it also needed a Cost of Living Allowance to adjust new york travel packages for its situation, too. You don't think Jerry Jones has alread