The league says it wants to move a team to London. The league presumably knows that, from a competitive standpoint, it will be impossible to ensure that the London team has a fair chance without inviting criticism from the other 31 teams that it has received an unfair edge.
The compromise could be expansion of the current slate of games involving different teams from three to as many as eight, giving folks in London the equivalent of a full season of games to watch, in a shrink-wrapped variety pack.
A decision made last week points toward the notion of getting more teams to sacrifice home games for the benefit of feeding the increasing English appetite for American football. Daniel Kaplan of SportsBusiness Journal reports that the owners voted to require any team that hosts a Super Bowl to give up a home game to London at some point over a five-year period.
It’s a genius move, given the leverage the league has when it comes to determining the location of the annual championship game. Competition already is fierce, with cities and team agreeing to all sorts of demands in order to secure the game.
But if a team will be moving to London, why include the requirement of giving up a home game in order to get a Super Bowl? The obvious answer is that a team won’t be moving to London.
There always will be a handful of teams willing to trade a home game to be played in a stadium that isn’t quite packed for the extra revenue that comes from hosting a game before 80,000 or so in a different country. (That willingness could increase if the blackout rule goes away, and if more fans choose to stay home.) The challenge becomes nudging the teams with full houses to give up 1/8th of the annual regular-season stadium revenue.
The Super Bowl trade-off creates one more guaranteed game per year, with the flexibility to use that game over a five-year window. Look for the NFL eventually to draft teams to host games in London, crafting a Hard Knocks-style formula for determining who’ll be tapped on the shoulder if there aren’t enough volunteers.
Still, to get eight games per year, the NFL will have to persuade 25 percent of the league to give up a home game, each and every season. That may not be easy to do. If, however, the NFL is serious about getting the most out of the English market, everyone has to be willing to export a home game, at least once per decade if not more often.
