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But I didn't see any of them winning the FA Cup either.

The NFL is actually considering - and I mean truly considering, with insiders considering it to be a 5-to-10 year plan - an expansion team a/o relocated team in London. The fact of putting approx. 80,000 butts in Wembley every time there's been a regular season game hosted there is a big contributing factor to that decision. At the very least, the London regular-season game is slated to occur at least for the next 5 years, and for some of those years more than once. It also helps - at least in the immediate area, if not the same nation - that the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers' owner is also the U.S. ambassador to Eire; and of course that the St. Louis Rams are co-owned with Arsenal FC and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are co-owned with Man U.

We had our own league at one point. I even went to a game. It sort of died out when Channel 4 stopped showing the US matches. It was never big enough that it was televised.

Mikey wrote:The fact of putting approx. 80,000 butts in Wembley every time there's been a regular season game hosted there is a big contributing factor to that decision.

I suspect they're making a mistake there. People turning up for the novelty value is a bit different from sustained interest in the sport on a sufficient scale to be worth shipping teams back and forth for a full season.

Rugby is to similar, and in the opinion of the Empire, superior. Rugby will always be a novelty sport in the US played by expats and enthusists, and vice versa for American football in British countries.

IanKennedy wrote:We had our own league at one point. I even went to a game. It sort of died out when Channel 4 stopped showing the US matches. It was never big enough that it was televised.

Good lord, don't remind me. There's three hours of my life I'll never get back.

(Not that a "soccer" game is much better IMO. But at least it's shorter.)

I feel we should just replace both Footballs with that Kabbadi, seems much more interesting.

Captain Seafort wrote:

Mikey wrote:The fact of putting approx. 80,000 butts in Wembley every time there's been a regular season game hosted there is a big contributing factor to that decision.

I suspect they're making a mistake there. People turning up for the novelty value is a bit different from sustained interest in the sport on a sufficient scale to be worth shipping teams back and forth for a full season.

You misunderstand me. Nobody's talking about taking the two annual games that are held over there and expanding that number to 16; rather, they're talking about either: a) adding a 33rd team to the league and basing it in London, or b) moving an existing team permanently to London. Obviously they won't sell out every game, at least until a time-intensive set of even small-scale inroads is made; but ticket sales are a small fraction of any NFL team's income. TV revenue and merchandising are surprisingly lucrative fields for the NFL; and even though those fields would be diminished in London compared to even a mid-market U.S. team, the fact of those sources having an amazingly high margin percentage means they'd still be viable sources of revenue.

I'll give you one example of which I know offhand: my alma mater has agreed to join a more prestigious league for 2014. Bear in mind that I'm talking about collegiate football, not even the pros. Each team in this league gets $25 million per annum from the league JUST from television rights.