The NFL is the largest sporting body in the largest economy in the world, and is home to the likes of the Dallas Cowboys, the wealthiest franchise on earth. Each year, the top flight of American football draws in excess of 17 million spectators per regular-season game, with a total viewing audience of 208 estimated for Super Bowl LVI alone, and generates around $10 billion a year from broadcast rights, merchandising and ticket sales. That the sport can grow to such a size being largely supported by a domestic audience is extraordinary, yet many behind the running of the organization have dreams for taking the spectacle of gridiron action global. Interest in integrating international conferences into the fold, or founding entirely new teams and cadet-leagues overseas has always been there, but seldom has anything substantial taken root. Why is this? Here we will attempt to answer this question, and hopefully gain some insight into whether the sport will ever find its feet as an international concern.
NBA Forging International Links
Perhaps the NFL should take a leaf out of the NBA’s book. This organization has cultivated healthy and lasting links with leading basketball leagues around the world, and has even fostered growth in the sport into new markets from Sub-Saharan Africa to mainland China. The European equivalent of the NBA, the EuroLeague, has fast become a leading tributary of upcoming NBA talent alongside the domestic NCAA league. Increasingly, players are moving between the two, with many NBA players also tipped to move to the EuroLeague each season. Increasingly this is tying both sides of the Atlantic together in closer cooperation. Talk of a global basketball super-league grows louder every year as the European stage has been seen to have matured to a level where its leading sides can, and have, successfully faced-off against play-off level NBA squads and come away the victors.
Association Football
Elsewhere, football, or soccer, is the largest competitive sport in the world, with international teams and domestic leagues competing from every country in the world. Every four years the FIFA World Cup takes place – the next is due to be held in November of this year in Qatar. This is on track to be the most spectated sporting event in human history. While the Tokyo Olympics drew in 3 billion viewers, the next World Cup is projected to peak at over 5 billion. The revenues involved at all levels of this process are dizzying. In the 2018 Russian World Cup, the world sports betting industry posted revenues of $155 billion. With Qatar on track to be a significantly larger event, this valuation is likely to be exceeded. Football is the most bet on sport in the world, with comparison platforms such as ArabianBetting ideally positioned to direct any number of the 1.2 million projected incumbent football fans for November’s tournament to the very best Arabic football betting sites available in the region. Not only do such platforms collate leading bookmakers, but they confer competitive sign-up bonuses and free bet offers to their customers, driving the organic reach of this sector through widespread positive regard among users. This benefits from this industry, and the sports it covers.
Too Little Too Late?
All of this is impressive – but what does it say about American football in 2022? Well for one, it’s unlikely American football will catch on elsewhere with the same fervor as can be found in the States, due to football and other sports already occupying pride of place. Even if we look at gridiron’s closest relative, rugby, we can see it’s significantly smaller than other sports. That said, rugby still commands a truly international roster of teams and tournaments, and its model could serve as a viable template for the NFL’s international expansion. There are also questions around the relative complexity of American football’s rule-set, which can look esoteric to outsiders. This isn’t an intrinsic impediment, but also points to why equally complex games like cricket struggle to gain a foothold outside of their heartlands.
The NFL International Series and a London Team Hopeful
Each year the NFL hosts exhibition matches in the UK, Mexico and occasionally Germany with the hope of raising the sport’s profile internationally and stoking interest in its leading franchises. This appears to be working, but at a subtle level. Talk of a new London-based team looks to be the likeliest option for the sport getting its first international addition, but questions about the logistics of flying teams across the Atlantic have thus far hampered further development.
