By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 27, 2007

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.

"This is different, this is the real thing," Waller said. "I think in this day and age with consumers and fans around the world, they know what is real and what is not. When we did a lot of research, there was this underlying belief that they weren't getting the best available."

The league's owners enthusiastically endorsed the idea, even knowing they won't only have to give up a home game but also might be putting their team through the distraction of long-distance travel in the middle of the season, a time when most coaches do not welcome any kind of interruption to the routine. They also ignored the fact that many publicly funded U.S. stadiums have lease clauses forbidding their tenants from playing home games elsewhere, an issue, for instance, for the Baltimore Ravens but not the Washington Redskins.

"I wish I had the opportunity to bring a game overseas in the 1980s," said Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber, the former head of NFL Properties who started its international office and ran it through the 1990s. "People used to say, 'We don't want to see your second-best players.' "

In his earliest days of trying to establish grassroots interest in football, Garber struggled with simply getting people to understand the game. At one youth clinic, NFL employees tossed footballs onto the field and the kids began kicking them as if they were soccer balls. At another, a tall, rangy German youth soccer star who was a brilliant wide receiver in flag football games walked away after putting on a helmet and pads for the first time and taking a hit.

"It was a unique experience for a guy like me who was in charge of NFL Properties for several years to have to sit down in an airport lounge in London or Tokyo and explain to somebody what a pigskin was," Garber said.

What encouraged league executives was the reaction they got from the international business community. While local sports fans seemed to show little or no interest in American football, Tagliabue was enormously popular among worldwide executives. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to meet the man who ran the most lucrative sports league in the world. Garber spent a significant amount of his time overseas coordinating introductions for Tagliabue, including one with the Japanese prime minister who specifically requested an audience.

Still, it spoke to a divide the NFL has never been able to fill. People around the world admire the NFL's ability to make money but weren't much interested in the product for themselves.

Waller is hoping he can change all that. He considers the 86,000 or so fans who will be at Wembley tomorrow as "football ambassadors." So to be sure they know exactly what is happening, there will be constant tutorials on the giant scoreboard.

Waller knows education is a problem. When he looked for a model, he settled on the English Premier League -- a onetime struggling regional soccer league that has blossomed in recent years to become more popular in many countries than those countries' own soccer leagues.

What Waller admires most about the Premier League is the way it can explain itself in other countries, supplementing game coverage with other league programs in many languages that run features on players and interviews with coaches. It enables potential fans to bond with stars. The NFL doesn't do this, Waller laments. Rather, it assumes fans already understand the telecasts and thus when American telecasts are translated straight into another language, those same assumptions remain.

Richard Scudamore, the chief executive of the Premier League, did not want his league to suffer the same consequences. A few years ago, he stopped dealing with international rights agencies and began selling the game himself to networks worldwide. This allowed the Premier League to add its own shows. The league's television deals, he said, are some of the most complex in sports, but the result is a growing international fan base.

"There's no point in just taking their money. You have to give them something more," he said.

Yet even if the NFL plays more regular season games overseas, duplicates the Premier League's television plan and follows through on NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's recent suggestion to possibly play a Super Bowl in London, will it matter? The Premier League, after all, is just a high-end version of soccer, the most popular sport in the world. In the end, the NFL still has to find a way to make people in other countries care about its game. So far it hasn't been able to do that.

"Grassroots is important," said Scudamore, who worked for several years in the United States as a newspaper executive. "One of the challenges is how do you get the same ingrained interest levels?"

While baseball and basketball have been able to tap into lucrative Asian markets, the NFL has decided to leave them alone. No one around the league has been able to figure out a way to hold regular season games in Tokyo or Shanghai. An exhibition game in Beijing between Seattle and New England in August was canceled, the league said, to concentrate on the London game. If the NFL is unable to find a way into China and Japan, it would seem to have little hope of creating a great international empire anytime in the near future.

And London may be a bad test of the NFL's ultimate popularity internationally because there are so many Americans living in Britain. It's plausible that the Wembley stands tomorrow could be filled with American expatriates.

Given the failure of previous attempts to play football games in Europe, there are no guarantees to think this one will be any different.

"It hasn't worked so far," said Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen. "It can work in a sophisticated market like London, where people watch the game. But can it work in Munich? I don't know."