American Football Targets Overseas for Growth
CHICAGO — While America’s version of football dominates U.S. airwaves, the sport remains an oddity overseas.
The National Football League (NFL) is pushing to change that by playing its first regular season game outside the United States and sponsoring children’s flag football contests in countries where basketball and soccer reign supreme.
"With the right coaching, with the right resources, anybody can play this game," Gordon Smeaton, head of the NFL’s international operations, said in an interview. "We often pigeonhole ourselves that this is just a North American phenomenon. It’s not."
However, American football has a long way to go with children whose first instinct is to dribble soccer balls with their feet or basketballs with their hands.
"Globally, the NFL is playing a little bit of catch-up," said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.
The NFL is concentrating marketing efforts on countries offering the strongest growth opportunities — Canada, Mexico, Germany, Britain, Japan and China.
It has played preseason games abroad for 55 years, including one in Tokyo last month. However, for the first time in the NFL’s 86-year history, the Arizona Cardinals will "host" a regular season game against the San Francisco 49ers on October 2 at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, where a crowd topping 100,000 is expected.
"There’s a real fan base in Mexico. That’s a very intriguing and potentially very lucrative market for the NFL," said David Carter, a sports business professor at the University of Southern California.
LATE START
In China, the NFL needs to overcome its late start in a country where basketball, with National Basketball Association (NBA) hero Yao Ming, is the number one sport.
"In basketball’s case, they had a 100-year head start so we’re playing an aggressive game of catch-up," said Smeaton.
The NFL has helped to develop flag football — a non-contact version of the sport played by children — in more than 80 Chinese middle schools over the last two-and-a-half years and hosted the flag football world championship last month in Beijing.
It launched a Mandarin Chinese version of its website two years ago, joining existing Spanish, German and Dutch versions.
Kevin Mo, a research engineer and Maryland resident who writes for NFL.com’s Mandarin site, said education was paramount.
"If they think they don’t understand the rules, they won’t watch the game," the Chinese native said of his countrymen."
The NFL has educational shows teaching the game’s rules and strategies.
"People have to feel comfortable with the game," said Smeaton. "What we’re finding particularly in Asia is our Japanese and Chinese fans love the strategy. If it’s a battle for territory and you make that point clear, it starts to make a lot more sense."
The NFL hopes to stage a preseason game in Beijing ahead of the 2008 Olympics and is looking at helping Chinese high schools to add tackle programmes to ensure flag football players keep playing as they get older. It also hopes to broaden television coverage of its playoffs.
Obstacles included the lack of Olympic status for the sport, the absence of Asian players and no history of team contact sports in China, analysts said.
"The sports marketplace (in China) is just a land grab," Swangard said. "The NFL needs to grab a share of people’s affinity now because everybody’s going to be there soon. That’s why (Formula One’s) there. That’s why golf’s there. That’s why tennis is there."
Favorite SPORT
Professional basketball is not ready to cede its dominant position. Recent surveys by the NBA, which has its own Mandarin website, showed three-quarters of Chinese men aged 15 to 24 were NBA fans and more than 40 percent said basketball was their favorite sport to play.
NBA officials worry more about competition from soccer than from other U.S. sports.
"We wake up every day thinking about what do we need to do to encourage little boys and little girls to dribble basketballs with their hands instead of kicking footballs with their feet," said Andrew Messick, head of the NBA’s international operations.
The NFL has a European league with six teams in Germany and the Netherlands. Some see this as less than successful, however, considering it was once called the World League of American Football and included teams from England, Scotland and Spain, as well as four in North America.
An NFL team outside the United States is a possibility, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has said, although getting a squad in Los Angeles remains the top priority.
"It could be very likely that the next franchises in the NFL beyond 32 (current teams) are outside the United States. Toronto would certainly be a candidate," he said in February.
In the end, the NFL might be a victim of its own success as a sport so quintessentially American that it has a hard time breaking out of North America.
"It has succeeded so much in the United States over the last 20 years," USC’s Carter said, "that it almost makes it difficult for them to position themselves as a global sport."