What Could A London NFL Team Do For The Amateur Game?

With the NFL International Series returning to London and talk of a permanent franchise reaching fever pitch, we ask what this would mean for the BAFA leagues...

It’s October, which for British NFL fans means one thing: the International Series is back. All week the newspapers have been full of discussion, anticipation, and photos of fully kitted New York Jets players riding the Tube, but there’s one topic that the media can’t get enough of at this time of year – the prospect of a London-based NFL franchise.

However, amongst all the talk of financial benefits, fan marketing, and logistics, one aspect that hasn’t been discussed is what this means for the scores of existing American football teams in Britain. With the BAFA leagues’ burgeoning participation figures, American football is one of the fastest growing sports in this country at amateur level, but the NFL’s last attempt to base a team in London during the popularity boom at the turn of the 90's – the London Monarchs of the experimental World League of American Football (WLAF) - failed spectacularly. After a promising start at Wembley which saw them win the inaugural WLAF championship in 1991 with an average home crowd of around 40,000, their implosion was followed by the late 90’s collapse of British American football.

With this in mind, we asked some veterans of the British leagues what they think a future London-based NFL franchise could do for our own game.

Ian Derbyshire - Head Coach, Halton Spartans - Years in the game: 31

I was a massive fan of the London Monarchs – I used to travel to London and back to watch every home game. I remember going to the World Bowl at Wembley, and it was the best atmosphere I’ve ever experienced at a game. I think an NFL team in London would work very well and would attract fans from all over the country, not just London.

My view of why American football peaked and then died off in the late 90’s is that it was a victim of its own success. It got popular in this country off the back of a 2-hour highlights program on a Sunday afternoon on Channel 4 in the 80’s. We were watching games from the previous week, but we all got hooked, so we went out and wanted to start playing and started our own league. The 90’s came, the era of Sky, and with the Monarchs, everyone was clamouring for more and more football, so Sky picked up the rights to the NFL – but they took it off terrestrial TV and away from Sunday afternoons, and the viewership actually dropped. It fell away from the public consciousness, and teams started shutting down all over the place in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

The reason we’ve seen a resurgence in the game recently is because of the NFL’s presence at Wembley. People can go and see it again, it’s talked about all week in the national press and on TV the week of the game, and now we can see everyone wants to be part of it again, there’s teams springing up all over the place.

There are a lot of logistical considerations for the NFL moving a team permanently, but regarding our league, it could only be a good thing.

Warren Smart - Head Coach, Wembley Stallions - Years in the game: 30

The league fell apart last time because there were a lot of differing attitudes about how to do things, because we were learning and we didn’t know what was needed. That’s come with time, people have come along and helped organise the British leagues.

The problem with selling American football is that to someone who doesn’t understand it, it can just look like 22 men running around in the dirt. There needs to be recognisable quality, and we were very lucky in the 80’s, we had teams like the London Ravens, London Olympians and Thames Valley Chargers playing some exceptionally high quality football, but for every one of them there were ten that were just running around. Not to disrespect anybody – we were all learning, but it wasn’t always something you could market to people.

A London NFL team would absolutely benefit us, it couldn’t do anything but! It would raise the profile so high – especially with it being the actual NFL. It was one thing when we had the watered down World League, and whatever that became [NFL Europe], but an NFL team would really put Britain, and London especially, on the map as part of the number 1 sport in America, with that global army of fans. People will be more aware of it, and if it’s marketed correctly we can piggyback off that and get on the bandwagon. That’s actually one of the reasons we called our team the Wembley Stallions, and not the London Stallions – the amount of online hits we get from people searching for American football at Wembley.

Mark Pagett - Head Coach, Birmingham Bulls - Years in the game: 23

The Monarchs was mostly made up of superstars from the US, but they wanted to build a youth squad of players that could play for the Monarchs in the future, which I was a part of. For me at the time, it just filled my head with confidence, and I had all sorts of ideas about doing this for a career. But that all came crashing down when they pulled the Monarchs franchise.

A lot of the established British players quit the game entirely, having felt snubbed by both the World League and the new Great Britain international set up. These players stepping aside created a vacuum of talent in the senior game for quite a few years.

The Monarchs hurt the game more than anything. All the fans and all the people that were coming to watch us, and bringing that revenue stream, all left the national game and went to see the WLAF at Wembley, and it really killed the sport. It wasn’t done in a sensitive manner, it just completely gutted the fans out of the local teams. At Birmingham we had the ‘Bulls Faithful’, who once numbered as high as 7000, and by the year 2000 there were about seven guys left. They used to get their own coaches and they would follow us everywhere. It’s frightening when you compare it to now. It all stopped in the early 90’s.

However, this time it could be different. The national game isn’t as big as it was in the late 80’s, and having a proper NFL team in London, playing in the actual NFL instead of the WLAF, would be HUGE for us – as long as it was done more sensitively. I’d love to see them, along with BAFA, invest in the infrastructure of the British teams.

Ed Morgan - Chairman, London Blitz - Years in the game: 13

I think you can see, since the International Series started in 2007, in that time the level of media exposure that the NFL has got in the UK has increased exponentially. It’s gone up so much, and all that exposure means more people seeing the game and more people being interested. It’s a misnomer that the British league would be competing with the NFL for spectators.

I think it would be a positive thing if it drew on British players, because that would show young people coming into the game that there are opportunities in this sport – just as there have recently been young British players making it onto NFL practice squads, such as Efe Obada from the London Warriors, who really serve as role models. These guys really inspire younger players and give them something to play for.

When I started playing in the early 2000’s, the number of teams in the league was decreasing every year, and now we’ve got massive growth year on year, we’ve got women’s football, we’ve got the massively growing student game; it’s a very exciting time.

The NFL doesn’t have any responsibility for our league, which has its own things to organise, but I think the area where the NFL can really support the British game is helping roll the sport out into schools, putting resources behind it so PE teachers can get kids playing the game. That’s already starting to happen in places around London.