American Football

When I was younger I used to play Rugby for my school team, I was never very good and rarely actually got to play in a game but I was there, I was in the team and that was great fun.

That lasted for a single season while I was in year nine, then I decided I’d consentrate on pissing about, going to the cinema instead of lessons and doing everything I could to avoid school.

During those pissing about years I did start to take a bit of a passing interest in American Football, mainly because a few of my mates tried to start a team - didn’t get anywhere as there wasn’t enough interest.

Which brings me on to the point of the post - will American Football ever be popular in the UK?

With Sir prance-a-lot, Mr Posh, Becks or stupid clothed girly haired David Beckham moving to the USA to play for some team I’ve never heard of somewhere in the States Fotball or Soccer as they like to call it is likely to get a lot bigger over there.

So why isn’t American Football becoming a mass sport over here?

Basketball is growing quickly with the British Basketball League pulling in fairly respectable numbers and attracting well known American basketball players here after they’ve retired (similar situation to the US Soccer League to be honest).

The NFL do seem to want ‘Football’ to become a big, mass sport in the UK & Europe. They’ve started selling subscriptions to online streams of all the NFL games, they’ve been running a six team European League for years (despite hardly anyone actually going to see games).

There is even a British American Football League that has around 20 teams and even has it’s own version of the SuperBowl - the BritBowl but I’d not even heard of it until I started writing this post.

I do remember around the start of the 90s there was a massive push to get American Football into the hearts and minds of the great British people - but it fell flat on its arse and was dead by the mid-nineties. This included a British team that would play in the World Football League (also dead on its arse) called the London Monarchs.

ITV showed the SuperBowl live on Sunday night and didn’t exactly get particularly high ratings, to the point where a number of US news services are asking why ‘Football’ isn’t big around the world (almost sounding hurt at the same time).

On the subject of the SuperBowl, I’ve just had a look at the UK stats for it (live on ITV1).

It started well with 1.3 million but within 15 minutes that had dropped to 800,000 and within an hour it was down to just 500,000 and didn’t pick up again from there.

It was beaten by almost everything else in the timeslot including The Sky at Night, a signed version of Can Gerry Robinson Fix the NHS and International one-day cricket.

There are two reasons I can think that it doesn’t work in the UK at least. One would be the fact that we already have the original version of the sport in a much faster, more manly format (rugby) and Rugby is even taking off in other parts of the world.

The other would be that American Football is too slow and technical for an audience used to the fast pace of Football.

Share/Save