My brothers in London: Thoughts on early morning football
“We are all brothers.”
An Eagles fan told me this on Regent Street in the middle of London the day before the Dolphins vs. Raiders game earlier this season at Wembley Stadium.
I was there for the week, covering the team practices and the game (you can check out my videos here) but the highlight of my trip was the NFL Fan Rally the day before the game.
I spent that Saturday interviewing fans about the excitement surrounding the NFL International Series, and I found lots of fans. They wore jerseys of all 32 teams, many even traveling in packs where every member of the group had a different team name across their chest. They had stories about how they grew to pick a particular team to follow. They told me about late nights in front of the TV. Many of them sounded just like the obsessive NFL fans you’d find in the States.
At one point I came across a group of guys in Eagles jerseys, and interviewed them like I would have fans of any other team. Only after the camera was off did I let them know I was an Eagles fan too.
An Eagles fan who was actually from Philadelphia! Eagles fans from the UK! We were all excited to meet each other.
We took a picture, traded hugs and contact information, and then one of them told me we were all brothers. Their cell phones didn’t have 610 or 215 area codes, but they were real Eagles fans. And in a sea of strangers there was genuine kinship between us.
*****
I bring this up today, obviously, because there is football on at 9:30 a.m. ET here in the United States.
The Falcons and Lions are kicking off at 2:30 p.m. local time at Wembley, early enough for the whole game to finish before the normal Sunday television viewing window. This is the 10th game in London over the last eight years, but the first not to kick off at 6 p.m. local time (in the 1 p.m. ET slot).
Are you ready for some football? Your normal NFL Sunday triple-header has ballooned into a quadruple-header.
This has been met with mixed feelings, as has the majority of the London experiment.
Many fans see the whole London project as a cash grab at the expense of the players who have to travel and combat jetlag.
Others see it as a brilliant business move, reaching out to an untapped market.
Some say it isn’t a smart move because nobody in London cares.
Others say it works in theory but it isn’t fair to the teams who lose a home game.
Most people say that a franchise in London is an impossible goal with too many difficult logistics to work out.
I thought Jenny Vrentas from theMMQB.com did a great job reporting on these issues during her trip to London, which coincided with mine.
And you can count me among the crowd that thinks putting a team in London permanently is too difficult. I was also on the fence about the International Series before my trip last month. But after spending time in London, I absolutely understand the NFL’s interest in growing the market, and I think it’s a smart move on their part.
*****
What did I see in London to change my mind? Here are some scenes:
Regent Street was packed with not just people but enthusiasm. You can see it in the video above. Check out those shots with the GoPro that pan across the crowd in front of the stage.
Vrentas wrote that more than half a million fans showed up at the Fan Rally. Consider that the Associated Press reported 700,000 people showed up to the Seahawks’ Super Bowl Parade.
The fans were decked out in jerseys and absurd costumes, with all 32 teams represented. I saw jerseys for the current NFL stars you’d expect, and of course old fan favorites like Chad Ochocinco, Tim Tebow and Brett Favre.
Crucially, the fans weren’t just at the rally and the stadium during the times the media had their microphones out. At night, my friend Greg and I went to a casino because we wanted to find a place that would show the Eagles vs. 49ers and stay open through the end of the game (almost 1 a.m.). When we got there, we were stunned by the turnout at the upstairs bar, which had every NFL game on TV. Much of the bar was filled with fans in random scattered jerseys, much like the events we’d caught earlier in the weekend. We were seated among fans sporting jerseys from RG3 to Colin Kaepernick to Patrick Peterson. It seemed like everyone had a team and a rooting interest.
London’s TV coverage was solid, and not just of the game in the UK.
I joked on Twitter Sunday night about how former Eagle Cecil Martin is a big star in the UK, but he seemed like he was. Martin is a studio analyst for SKY Sports. The Eagles game had the U.S.’s feed with Joe Buck and Troy Aikman (branded as America’s Game of the Week!) but the commercial breaks in London were shorter. Instead of a full 2 minutes of commercials for cars and erectile dysfunction medicine, they’d come back to the SKY Sports studio for Martin and his panel to throw in some additional commentary before rejoining Buck and Aikman. This was a nice way to make an extra effort to help everyone keep up.
One of the highlights of the fan rally was when I bumped into Martin, and a throng of fans surrounding him. He stopped and posed for pictures with a group of squawking fans who treated him like a rock star. These were not fans who tuned in once a year for the game at Wembley, you could tell these were legitimate fans who watch him every week.
After the Eagles game ended, Greg and I went back to our hotel, and I turned on the Cowboys vs. Saints game, which kicked off at 1:30 a.m. I found another show on Channel 4, which I enjoyed a ton. It was about as casual an NFL show as you’ll see, but the hosts were funny and knowledgeable. Every time the Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth broadcast went to commercial, it cut to the studio in London where two guys in jeans on cushy chairs would go over the big storylines from the day, answer Twitter questions in live time, and joke about how nobody was watching because it was 3 a.m. But people were watching; I sat there and watched most of the game, checking out the steady stream of tweets heading toward their @C4NFL account.
*****
I don’t know how the NFL’s foray into London will end. They may move a team there, they may increase the slate of games to one a week, they may scale back if it ceases to be profitable.
But I know that a lot of fans out there love American football. And they watch it. And they understand it. And they follow it weekly.
So I don’t blame the NFL at all for trying to gain a bigger market presence. And I don’t fault them for trying out a new timeslot. You won’t see me bashing the idea of a 9:30 a.m. kickoff. Especially not now, while I’m firmly parked on the couch for an NFL quadruple-header.