NFL Again Goes Long To Score Fans

As London prepares for the Giants and the Dolphins tomorrow, Trafalgar Square is home to a giant Dolphin, Jason Taylor. The game is part of the NFL's effort to grow overseas. (By Tom Hevezi -- Associated Press)

They have been writing checks across America for decades now: the television networks, the corporate behemoths and the fans -- each amount larger than the one before until the NFL ballooned into the wealthiest sports league in the world. Last year alone it took in nearly $7 billion in revenue.

And yet in the new global economy, the NFL is something of a mastodon, bigger than everybody else but potentially less-suited to adapt. All around it, U.S. professional sports are reinventing themselves overseas. Baseball is popular in Japan and much of Latin America. The NBA has players from all over the world and counts fans in most of Europe and parts of the Middle East and China.

Tomorrow afternoon, they will turn on the lights in a London soccer palace called Wembley Stadium and the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants will play a regular season NFL game for the first time outside of North America. It is a move born of inspiration, for the NFL says it will stage many such games in European, Canadian and Mexican stadiums over the next few years in hopes that it can build a worldwide fan base and sell its television rights overseas.

But it is a move also born of desperation, because if the world continues to shrink and the NFL cannot find a way to sell itself abroad, it may finally realize its limitations. And no one in the great money-making machine is ready for that.

"Like Bob Dylan says, 'You're either being busy being born or you're being busy dying,' " Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay said. "I think you have to continue to grow."

How do you sell the NFL to a world that doesn't understand American football or even seem to care?

Inside the tower at Park Avenue and East 48th Street that houses the NFL's Manhattan headquarters, there is no overt acknowledgment that the league has failed in its previous international efforts -- a few exhibition games in locations such as Tokyo, Barcelona and Berlin and a European developmental league mercifully euthanized after 16 years, most operating at a loss. Still, there is the presence of Mark Waller, a native of Wales, who was hired last year from the British liquor industry to run the NFL's international pursuits as an acknowledgment that something had to be different.

Waller laughs at the idea that his background of selling scotch to a public that had moved on to vodka makes him uniquely qualified to push American football.

"It's not fear [of falling behind] that we have, but you can learn a lot from looking at the auto industry," Waller said. "In the 1960s in the car industry in Detroit there were probably a lot of discussions about the international auto market" that assumed it was invulnerable to outside competition. "I'm sure now they wish they had different discussions."

Waller saw his first football game 11 years ago, not long after he arrived in the United States -- a Packers-Vikings game at Lambeau Field in Green Bay -- and he found the experience exhilarating, from the sizzling bratwurst in the parking lot to the roaring crowd inside. Afterward he remembered saying to himself: "This is meaningful, this is powerful. I get it."

So when he settled into his modest executive's office at NFL headquarters, he decided immediately to change the league's international approach. Instead of trying to build the game from the bottom, he would sell it from the top.

Gone would be the wilting NFL Europa, the developmental league that had been dear to the previous NFL commissioner, Paul Tagliabue. In its place would be real games played in places such as London, Montreal, Berlin and Mexico City.