This one will go over well.
It’s easy to believe it won’t go over well, because it never does. But that didn’t stop Commissioner Roger Goodell from dangling the possibility of London hosting the Super Bowl, someday.
“It is not impossible, and it is something that has been discussed before,” Goodell told a fan forum in London last week, via Adam Schefter of ESPN.com.
It’s odd that the comments didn’t register when they were made. And it would be interesting to know whether Schefter tripped over this organically, or whether someone from the league office pointed it out with a wink-nod non-request request that he should do something with it.
Regardless, American NFL fans do not want the ultimate American sporting event to be sent overseas. The reaction to the possibility has always been loud, and it always has been negative.
Previously, the league’s reaction has been negative. When the issue first came up way back in 2009, the NFL strongly denied that any discussion of exporting the Super Bowl to England had occurred. The on-the-record statement from the league came in response to former NFL Senior V.P./Events Frank Supovitz saying that the league has “looked at Canada, Mexico, Germany and the U.K. as potential destinations outside the [U.S.] but identified London as the outstanding candidate,” and that the NFL was “expected to announce officially within the next 12 months” that a Super Bowl will be played in London.
Three years ago, Goodell linked any talk of a Super Bowl in London to the presence of a franchise there. This time around, Goodell did not expressly tie expansion and/or relocation to London as a precursor to hosting the Super Bowl.
“I think being able to play it in one of our cities -- it’s at a huge economic boost to those cities,” Goodell said at the fan forum. “Our fans live in those cities also. I think that is important. Not that we do not have great fans here [in London]; we do. So, as the international series develops, maybe that is a possibility as we play more games here.”
It’s hard not to regard such chatter as the latest effort by the league to create more buzz in England with the vague promise of a significant deepening of the relationship, whether through the placement of a team in London or the staging of the Super Bowl there. Even though the NFL has a strong niche following in the UK, American football still does not move the national needle.
Maybe, after 17 years, the NFL realizes that the only way to do that would be to take the biggest game of the year to London, or at least to tease the chance of doing so. The fact that the league is willing to piss off plenty of American fans simply by acknowledging the possibility suggests that the NFL currently wants to lean even farther into its international experiment.
Finally, there’s a serious practical impediment that rarely gets mentioned when talk of a London Super Bowl emerges. The game begins at 6:30 p.m. ET. That’s 11:30 p.m. ET in London. Schefter writes that the game “would have to be played” at 8:30 p.m. London time. Which would push the game to 3:30 p.m. ET, and 12:30 p.m. PT.
That alone is reason enough for those of us who appreciate the annual ritual of Super Sunday to strenuously object to the game being played anywhere but here.