For those who don’t get the NFL’s interest in London or think the league’s international reach is something of little interest to American football fans, please understand this: The NFL is determined to establish itself overseas, even if it takes a full-time team in London to do it.

On Tuesday, commissioner Roger Goodell was talking about games in London again. He did so at a conference at New York University, but he could have been speaking from any venue over the last several years. Reports from the meeting had Goodell proposing a third regular season game in England, playing in multiple stadiums around the country and perhaps even moving a current team to London. This is really no different from past suggestions of a London Super Bowl or an international game every week.

All should be warnings to American fans who brush away talk of an international NFL. The league is very serious about being overseas.

The most lucrative sports league in the world, with nearly $10 billion in revenue, has long been trapped by the borders of its own country. For years, the NFL has used its massive popularity in the U.S. to extract billions from American television networks. But there is also a worry the American networks will someday reach a ceiling and the Atlantic and Pacific will prove a far greater impediment to the growth of football than sports like soccer or basketball or even baseball and hockey.

Showing NFL games on television in cities like London and Frankfurt never worked. Neither did the springtime developmental league that played to unenthusiastic crowds unmoved by the splendor of watching American minor leaguers wallow through five-yard runs in the mud. Seven years ago, the NFL – desperate to find an overseas foothold -- hired an international marketing executive named Mark Waller, who spent time attending games in the U.S. and realized the best way to sell the NFL overseas is to have people experience real games with top players and see the passion of those teams’ fans. He decided they needed to see American football culture.

When Waller and I talked about this in 2007 – not long after his arrival to the NFL – he spoke of European fans wanting to see the real NFL, not a series of exhibitions or minor-league games. He said he believed international fans would adjust to a strange sport if they could feel it the way we do in the U.S. He made a comparison to Pepsi, saying the soft drink company first pushed itself overseas at a time when no one was interested in carbonated drinks internationally.

“It took time from when it was introduced to when it eventually got embedded,” he said.

He said he believed the same would happen with American football. Once Europeans got a feel for the real product, there would be a hunger for more.

In the six years since, his approach has been successful. The six games the NFL has played in Wembley Stadium since 2007 have been sellouts, drawing between 76,000 and 85,000. The league continues to push itself on London figuring the city to be the closest match to an American city given the common language and reasonable travel distance. Last fall, the office of the city’s mayor suggested the NFL could fill the abandoned stadium from last summer’s Olympics with a fulltime franchise.

But the drive isn’t just for London. Never did I grasp the urgency of the NFL’s overseas drive until I was standing in a driving rainstorm in Loudon County, Va., with a Taiwanese band named Mayday and a group of children playing flag football. The game, played in 2009, was part of an American tour the NFL arranged for the band, which is popular in China and Taiwan. The idea was to have the band members experience American football as they were filmed for a multi-part reality show to run on Chinese TV.

The league had targeted China as a sort of blank slate, a potentially lucrative nation with few of its own sports leagues and millions of younger people fascinated with America. As with the games in London, the NFL officials behind the series said they were trying to sell the NFL’s culture, believing the experience will be as attractive in other countries as it is here.

So, yes, the NFL is serious about London. It is serious about Asia. It is serious about taking our most American sports product and peddling it overseas until someone buys it. Maybe this is something American fans don’t want, preferring to see the American game as an American-only institution. The league does not agree.

The London talk will keep coming. More games are going to the UK. And it’s only a matter of time before games will be played in other European cities. Change is coming to the NFL we know. The American game is about to be more than just an American game.

 purplefood wrote:
There are quite a lot of Unis that play it actually...

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I was amazed on moving to the US to see how much money, following and power the school and especially the college football teams are as a business, there just isn't anything like that in the UK. (I was living in central PA when the Penn State/Sandusky/Paterno thing blew up, the seriousness of the issues, the contention, was all consuming. I saw men ready to beat each other up over the reputation of Joe Paterno).

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
They tried all this about 20 years ago, during a time of huge American influence on UK culture, the age of Roseanne and Thirtysomething. Some things spread well, fast food joints etc, other things, like American Football really just didn't work.

We had the London Monarchs, as I recall, and there was much talk of a real world league. It doesn't work, soccer (football) is rampant in the rest of the world and in several countries, including the UK, rugby is it's next in line. Since the late 90s, rugby has seen a surge in popularity and I don't see what American football has to offer that would really compete with either of them.

And as has been said, there is no local school interest or leagues, I was amazed on moving to the US to see how much money, following and power the school and especially the college football teams are as a business, there just isn't anything like that in the UK. (I was living in central PA when the Penn State/Sandusky/Paterno thing blew up, the seriousness of the issues, the contention, was all consuming. I saw men ready to beat each other up over the reputation of Joe Paterno).

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I'd really like to see Baseball as a unified world league. I spoke at length in a bar in Osaka with some Hanshin Tigers fans and a couple guys from Taiwan about their leagues (Half of those *******s were freaking Yankees fans for the American leagues, I almost had to spit out my beer and leave) but I could see the World Series being a no gak WORLD series with the best Asian League and South American League teams going against the top U.S. teams.

We'll let you commonwealth types in the club too if we can teach you how to hold an actual bat instead of that ridiculous cricket thing.

 SilverMK2 wrote:

 purplefood wrote:
There are quite a lot of Unis that play it actually...

Like most of the american sports it seemed mostly to be made up of american students with a smattering of other nationalities. I think the best represented sport for uk nationals is basketball as many schools play it.

Having said that there are a few people i know who are interested in NFL.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I'd really like to see Baseball as a unified world league. I spoke at length in a bar in Osaka with some Hanshin Tigers fans and a couple guys from Taiwan about their leagues (Half of those *******s were freaking Yankees fans for the American leagues, I almost had to spit out my beer and leave) but I could see the World Series being a no gak WORLD series with the best Asian League and South American League teams going against the top U.S. teams.

We'll let you commonwealth types in the club too if we can teach you how to hold an actual bat instead of that ridiculous cricket thing.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Don't knock cricket. There's a reason why it is the world's most popular sport. What other game offers matches lasting five days that end in a draw and have regular breaks for meals and tea?

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
When I can get games I watch Rugby. All Blacks fan here.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
The only problem that I can see with it is the sports culture gap. Most UK sports don't have many breaks between plays etc. whereas the NFL games do and that can be off putting for some people. Although the counter to this is that I knew many people who would stay up to watch the NFL Final, and having a game last for a few hours and having alcohol available might smooth over some of the differences

 Ahtman wrote:
I can't see it catching on. Not as manly as Rugby, but to masculine for soccer fans.

 gorgon wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
I can't see it catching on. Not as manly as Rugby, but to masculine for soccer fans.

American football is also an amazingly, stupidly complicated game. It's insane, really. The rules are arcane and the offenses and defenses are even more so. I've been watching the game my whole life and every year I still learn more about it.

I guess you can watch and enjoy it even if you don't understand much of what's going on. Like religion -- you take from it what you want. But I don't think it'll help in a place where soccer and rugby -- two simpler, free-flowing, much more intuitive sports -- rule.