London is known for football, the round ball sport known in America as soccer, but this Sunday Wembley Stadium will once again host an NFL game. Sunday's English showcase pits two winless teams against each other as the Pittsburgh Steelers (0-3) take on the Minnesota Vikings (0-3) Sunday. The game being played at Wembley Stadium has once again brought up some rumors of London someday possibly getting its own NFL franchise and a possibility that the NFL's first ever foreign Super Bowl could take place in England someday.
The venue of Wembley Stadium in London is usually the home of soccer games for England's national team, but it has also played host to regular season NFL games since 2007 and this year the NFL has expanded its annual international series to two games as following Sunday's game, the Jacksonville Jaguars will take on San Francisco 49ers on Oct. 27 in Wembley as well. The NFL began the initiative to try to spread the popularity of the sport beyond America's borders.
Stadium officials for Wembley are hoping to one day land an NFL franchise but according to Sports Illustrated, the league is years away from moving a franchise overseas. However, officials for Wembley said they're ready for the day the NFL decides to move abroad and that it wouldn't interfere with the soccer schedule.
"Absolutely we can," Wembley's operating manager Robert Maslin told Sports Illustrated Monday. "I am absolutely confident if [NFL Commissioner] Roger Goodell wanted to have a franchise here we could absolutely deliver on it."
According to Sports Illustrated, Maslin said that the two NFL games slated for this year sold out in just a couple of hours and the popularity of the sport is rising in England.
The magazine said that according to the NFL's senior vice president of international, Chris Parsons, the core fan base for football in Britain is now more than two million, which Parsons sited is double the amount of when the NFL first started playing games at Wembley in 2007, but still not enough to warrant bringing a franchise overseas.
"We've doubled our fan base in the last 3 1-2 to four years," Parsons said per SI. "I'd like to see that at least double again in the next three or four years. That would put us among the top five sports in the U.K. in terms of core fan base."
Parsons said it's still very much an option that a team could expand to London one day, but that there were "several steps we need to continue to take before we get to that deeper conversation," such as playing more games there as the years go by to establish a deeper fan base.
While it may be a long time before a football team plays in Britain regularly, Maslin still hopes that one day the NFL graces it with its biggest event of the year with Wembley hosting a Super Bowl someday.
"They are a very progressive organization so long, long, long term they might consider [a Super Bowl in London], but it's a hell of a call," Maslin said of the NFL, according to Sports Illustrated. "Absolutely ... if they bring it anywhere in the world we want it here at Wembley."
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