The NFL season kicks off again today with the Seattle Seahawks hosting the New England Patriots in a Super Bowl rematch. It got me thinking about the growing popularity of the sport in my country, the United Kingdom.
I got into the NFL at a time when my “soccer” team, Queens Park Rangers, were especially terrible. It was around 2022. The 16-hour round trips to away games in the less salubrious parts of the UK had begun to wear on me. After yet another 1-0 defeat on a cold rainy night in Stoke I realised I needed an escape. The balls-to-the-wall action of the NFL was exactly the thing my life was missing.
I decided to support the Seahawks. They were doing well at the time with Geno Smith at quarterback and a little background research uncovered this amazing story of a comeback kid. Geno had thrown 21 interceptions in his rookie season in 2013, had been involved in a nasty locker room altercation and torn his ACL. By 2022, he was 31 and had not begun a season as a first choice QB in eight years. Then Seattle gave him a chance. He quickly achieved a league-leading completion rate and managed 30 touchdowns in his first season as the full-time starter. In Geno’s words, “They wrote me off, I ain’t write back though.”
We British fans love how exotic and alien the sport is to us
Supporting the Hawks came with its pros and cons. On the one hand, picking a West Coast team was rather shortsighted because it meant staying up even later on Sunday nights to watch the games; my school grades plummeted. However, there’s a great deal of charm surrounding Seattle and the Seahawks, with the 12s being one of the most revered fan bases in all of sport.
The NFL has big plans to expand deeper into what commissioner Roger Goodell calls “international cities,” and the league already enjoys a large fanbase in the UK. Earlier attempts to create an NFL World League fell flat, despite a fair bit of buzz in the 1980s with calls to create the “London Monarchs.” But what British fans really like about the NFL is just how quintessentially American it is.
I’m thinking of its unapologetic patriotism, a characteristic that would be hard to replicate with a British NFL team. It’s true that the London games are consistently sold out, with long waiting lists for tickets. But that’s because some of us love Americana in all its vulgar glory.
We grow up with American TV shows and movies and are marinated from a young age in the Top Gun mentality. The NFL is a window into that culture and we peer through it with fascination and envy. The jets (not the hopeless New York NFL franchise) that fly above the games, leaving streams of red, white and blue in their wake, and the national anthem being belted out by tens of thousands of red-blooded Americans – this is what British fans love about the sport, mainly because it’s so exotic and alien to us. We are too easily embarrassed to celebrate ourselves so overtly. But we enjoy vicariously experiencing American chauvinism.
This all-American attitude was personified last weekend when the Indiana Hoosiers’ new QB, Josh Hoover, threw a touchdown with blood streaming down his face after a brutal foul a few plays earlier. It was exactly the sort of footballing heroism I’ve come to associate with this American fighter-pilot mentality.
There are other, more straightforward reasons for the growing popularity of the NFL in the UK. For one thing, Sky Sports recently acquired the rights to televise the NFL, making it accessible for people across the UK (at least, for those of us with a Sky Sports subscription). It’s also a great cure for the Sunday evening blues because no British sports are played then. One particular attraction for me is constructing complicated betting parlays before the games kick off. I end up adding more and more legs as I watch the potential payout get larger and larger, so I can fantasize about spending all that cash. It never comes in, of course. But America is all about daring to dream.
The expansion of the NFL into London has given its British fans an opportunity to experience the game with classic American add-ons, such as tailgating, which Brits have started doing over here. However, there is something missing from these games. It is obvious that these traditions are, to some extent, imitations of a deeper football culture, and I can’t help but think that a little of the magic is lost in translation.
That said, the London games still enable us to participate in the excitement of the NFL. And almost all top universities in the UK now have American Football societies where every aspect of NFL culture is enthusiastically replicated. I’m looking forward to meeting up with some fellow Hawks fans when I start at Edinburgh University next year.
After 18 years of watching sports dross (English, not American), I was finally rewarded with a magical Super Bowl run last season. Sam Darnold and Jaxon Smith-Njigba tore the league apart, and Mike MacDonald’s high-scoring defense was extraordinary. I watched it from a pub in London in the early hours of a Monday in February. At four o’ clock in the morning, walking through the abandoned sub-zero London streets, I had a realization: I love America.
I will be belting out the “Star Spangled Banner” when we play the Patriots tonight, filled with American self-belief and naive optimism. I’ve already laid bets on the Hawks chalking up a second Super Bowl victory next February.
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