American Football

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Keep American football in America

The United Kingdom is no longer a safe place for US Air Force bombers, it seems. But American football is another matter. Today, at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in one of London’s most ethnically diverse neighborhoods, the Jacksonville Jaguars will play the Philadelphia Eagles. It is almost certain to be a large scale bore-athon and another disappointment. Take it from a Londoner who has been to several NFL fixtures in my home city: it don’t work The game is one of nine NFL internationals this season – three in the UK, one in Australia, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil and Mexico. There’ll be all the razzmatazz: fireworks, cheerleaders, half-time shows. The TV commentators will hype up the foreign location.

Wednesday

Charlie Young

Why I love the NFL

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.

Monday

Britt McHenry

The Super Bowl halftime show gets lost in translation

Bad Bunny strolled into a tropically transformed Levi’s Stadium for his first ever Super Bowl halftime show and kept his promise: He sang all of his songs as written, en Español. If a healthy swathe of English-speaking Americans stared blankly at their screens wondering, “what am I watching?” Bad Bunny was undeterred. The same man who boycotted the contiguous United States just eight months ago due to the perceived prospect of ICE raids at his concerts looked confident and ironically, smug, commanding America’s musical zeitgeist moment on the mainland. He began his show strolling through a quickly assembled Latin Margaritaville. Visually, the camera zoomed way too close to Bad Bunny’s face. We get it: The guy has a near-immaculate face card.

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

The National Football League goes international

On a beautifully gray Madrid afternoon, a group of prominent executives and representatives of America’s most popular sports league gathered to discuss how to divide up the world. There were repeated references to shared values, community engagement, cultural appreciation and “cross-border connection through competition.” The many well-dressed attendees nodded along, doubtlessly hearing each of these totemic invocations for what they really mean – money, in unimaginable sums, and the National Football League’s bold plan to take over the planet. This season the NFL has played seven international games. Madrid, São Paulo, Dublin and Berlin each hosted one fixture. London got three.

Football

Sunday

Charles Walford

In defence of American sport

From our UK edition

This afternoon, just shy of 75,000 fans of American football will flood in to watch the Atlanta Falcons take on the Indianapolis Colts, in what is set to be the Colts’ largest attendance for a home game this season. A few weeks ago, more than 86,000 turned out to watch the Jacksonville Jaguars face the LA Rams in what was the Jaguars’ best-attended home game this year. The most surprising thing about this? Both games were taking place more than 4,000 miles from the NFL’s heartland – one in Berlin, one in London. Recently, Sean Thomas claimed on Spectator Life that America has failed to export its ‘laughable’ sports.

Tuesday

Britt McHenry

It pays to be a bad college-football coach

These days, getting fired is the best thing that can happen to a college-football coach. Hugh Freeze is the latest head coach to get voted off the NCAA college-football island. With a 15-19 record in nearly 3 seasons at Auburn University and a loss Saturday where they barely mustered 3 points against Kentucky, the Tigers fell to 1-5 in the SEC. A record like that in such a revered conference can only mean one thing in 2025: termination.As they say on Survivor, the tribe has spoken. Auburn will have to buy Freeze out for $15.4 million. It is about the same dollar amount they forked over when they canned their last coach 8 games into his second season. In total, Freeze drives away with a cool $39 million after working for only half of his six-year deal.

Thursday

James Delingpole

A great comedy about a terrible sport

From our UK edition

I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and portcullised helmets shout numbers, bash into one another, then wait half an hour while the referee decides whether or not they’re allowed to throw a spinny ball and maybe one day end up being Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend.

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

To win, the Tories should be the party of motorists

From our UK edition

The path to electoral success at the next election is straightforward. Just follow what I call the Channel 5 strategy. Channel 5 is a rare success story in the world of free-to-air broadcasting, a feat attained by following a simple playbook: making programmes the public likes to watch, but which people working in television are mostly too precious to make. Channel 4 got there first. By broadcasting American football, it found a sport which was far more popular with the public than most ‘people in television’ realised. Every NFL game played in London since 2007 saw sold-out crowds at Twickenham or Wembley; when the Pittsburgh Steelers made an appearance in Regent Street, more than 250,000 people turned up.

Saturday

Britt McHenry

Male cheerleaders? Who cares

The most famous cheerleaders in the National Football League once belonged to the Dallas Cowboys. Both fans and haters of the Texas stars affectionately referred to the busty, well-coiffed, smiling gals as “America’s sweethearts.” Today, America’s most-talked-about sweetheart is . . . a man. This week, the Minnesota Vikings announced its new cheer squad on Instagram in a video that quickly went viral. In it, a young male cheerleader sashays in the middle of a dance group accompanying a caption that reads, “The next generation of cheer has arrived.” Shortly after, another male cheerleader said he also was joining the squad.  They sure stirred up the crowd. Twitter fingers went flying faster than a back handspring.

male cheerleaders

Friday

Roger Alton

The Super Bowl spectacle is marketing genius

It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic lawmaker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: "Fly me to New Orleans." Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays a touching version of "America the Beautiful" and an announcer calls for a moment’s silence to mark the importance of "faith, family and football"?

Super Bowl

Thursday

Roger Alton

Emperor Trump and the spectacle of the Super Bowl

From our UK edition

It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic law-maker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: ‘Fly me to New Orleans.’ Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays a touching version of ‘America the Beautiful’ and an announcer calls for a moment’s silence to mark the importance of ‘faith, family and football’?

Thursday

Michael Hann

My night with the worst kind of nostalgia 

From our UK edition

American Football are a band whose legend was formed by the internet: some Illinois college kids who made an album for a little label in 1999, went their separate ways, and in their absence found that a huge number of people had responded to their music. They duly reunited in 2014. They are often identified as emo, the most confounding of all genre names, given it means everything and nothing, but American Football are not of the eyeliner and dyed-hair variety exemplified by My Chemical Romance, nor the angsty pop-punk variant of Weezer or Jimmy Eat World, nor the shouty hardcore punk evolution of the genre’s founders in the 1980s.

Thursday

Mike Tunison

Will Aaron Rodgers pull a Brett Favre and go to the Jets?

Somehow an off-season for Aaron Rodgers that began with a multiday stop in a darkness retreat isolation chamber to decide his next career move has only gotten weirder now that Rodgers has announced his intention to be traded to the New York Jets. Immediately, Rodgers's decision to go to Gang Green triggered a big storyline: that he's following in the footsteps of his legendary Green Bay quarterback predecessor, Brett Favre, whose departure from the Packers to the Jets following the 2007 season was similarly fraught. Favre lasted only one tumultuous year in New York, during which he made headlines for texting dick pics to broadcaster Jenn Sterger. The Jets that year started 9-5 only to lose their final two games and miss the playoffs.