European first: The NFL kicks off in London

[*jr]

Does this mean we'll be seeing English American Football hooliganism soon!
========================

European first: The NFL kicks off in London
The Miami Dolphins play the New York Giants Sunday to test market for football.
By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 26, 2007 edition

Page 1 of 2

London - The NFL abroad. That's the story in the land of London fog on Sunday, when the Miami Dolphins host the New York Giants at Wembley Stadium, in the first NFL regular season game ever played outside the Americas. When the tickets went on sale last February, some 88,000 were sold in 72 hours.

For the NFL's brand-name brain trust, England and its environs are the next logical phase of globalization. They see the oblong American pigskin as a rising symbol of global sports, in an age of live media everything. Click on Tom Brady, from Bristol. Join a virtual tailgate, from Wales. Look out Germany and Spain. Even China seriously considered an exhibition last August.

"Live sport, and great live sport, is one of the unifying things people want right now," argued Mark Waller, head of the NFL's international division in New York. "We don't have an English sports world or an American sports world. My kids navigate every sport on the Internet."

Here, the blokes don't play American football. But they do watch it, party, and pub with it, and in serious enough numbers to get taken seriously. Last year's Super Bowl drew 5 million viewers in the mother country, according to NFL officials in New York. In the run-up to the Dolphins-Giants game, Wembley was dangled by the NFL as a future venue for the biggest single-day TV audience known to humankind.

more...
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1026/p07s03-woeu.html