NFL Serious About London, Laying Groundwork for Pipe Dream

It's too big. It's too expensive. There's no need for it. It'll lose a ton of money. It's an ego trip. It's a power trip. It's a fool's errand. It's a pipe dream. It'll never fly.

For years, the NFL's rumored expansion to London has been perceived as pie-in-the-sky daydreaming at best and league-sinking folly at worst. There are countless reasons it seems impossible, from basic logistics to immigration laws, from league-alignment problems to questionable UK demand.

It's the NFL's "Spruce Goose."

The derisively nicknamed Hughes H-4 Hercules was supposed to transport American troops and tanks to England during World War II. It was six times bigger than any aircraft ever built before and is still bigger than any aircraft built since. It was made almost entirely of wood to conserve precious steel and aluminum.

It took so long to design and build that the war ended before it was done. The government sank so much money into it that Howard Hughes himself was called before Congress to justify the expense. Nearly 70 years later, Hughes' boondoggle is still the ultimate example of ego-driven vanity projects.

Commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL owners have all but decided to put a franchise in London. Goodell told Alex Flanagan on NFL Total Access (h/t NFL.com's Mike Coppinger) that a franchise in London depends on "how fast" fan interest grows and in the same interview said they "couldn't be more surprised" by the "tremendous demand."

It seems like the question is not if but when, and the answer to when might be soon.

Matt Dunham/Associated Press

With the release of the 2015 International Series schedule, we've been given an idea of how the NFL plans to pull this off—and it's brilliant. The league, from the beginning, has made sure UK fans see both a rotating group of teams and the same clubs several times in a short window.

For the first time, however, UK fans will see a divisional matchup: The Miami Dolphins will "host" the New York Jets in Wembley in 2015, meaning Dolphins fans won't watch their team take on, arguably, their most hated rival.

"It's unprecedented," Andrew Abramson of The Palm Beach Post wrote in wake of the announcement. "It wasn’t even believed to be a possibility because that means one of the teams will have the advantage of playing at home while the other 'hosts' at a neutral site. [It feels like a] competitive disadvantage."

Giving one team in a rivalry a leg up in 2015 is just one small way the NFL risks upsetting its carefully calibrated competitive balance—not to mention the massive, rabid fanbase established for generations in America—for the greater goal of London.

Per Daniel Kaplan of SportsBusiness Journal, cities vying to host the Super Bowl will have to agree to play a home game in Wembley:

As I wrote in 2013, and many others have before and since, just playing games in London is a logistical quagmire. The hurdles to jump over are many and tall, from collecting taxes to securing work permits. As former Tampa Bay Buccaneers operations manager Joe Bussell wrote, fans can't begin to imagine how steep the challenge is:

"

The devil of London isn’t in the sheer volume of work that goes into it. It’s in the details. It’s the little things that slide under the radar that could really cause issues. For example, for every copier, printer, laminator or anything electronic that we shipped over, we had to have adapters sent over because electrical plugs in the United Kingdom are different than in the United States. We had to ship all of our own paper because the paper size in London is different due to the metric system. We even had to rewire the entire first hotel and add breakers so that the electrical system could support our demands. Because the hotel was a resort and spa, they didn’t have alarm clocks in the rooms. We ordered 150 digital alarm clocks off of Amazon and spent half a day stuffing double-A batteries into them and then setting them to the correct time. Most people use their phones as alarms nowadays, but the coaches didn’t want players having any excuses for being late to meetings or practices. Whatever it takes.

"

Teams in a division with London will be guaranteeing a game out there every year. The London team would have the greatest home-field advantage and worst road-team disadvantage in sports history. Teams wouldn't be able to have the cushion of a bye week before or after, as they do now—and a London team might not stop the International Series either.

All this, and we haven't yet solved the prosaic problems of how to handle expansion, realignment, the preseason and the playoffs.

Jacksonville Jaguars general manager Dave Caldwell, chief executive of a team bound to play in London every year through 2016, knows quite a bit about the troubles of playing in the UK. He has some solutions too.

Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press

"The NFL hasn’t mandated that every player have a passport," Caldwell told Ryan O'Halloran of The Florida Times-Union, "but if we’re going to continue to play games over here, we feel like they should. It limits you and it limits opportunities for players—a guy could possibly miss out on coming over here if he didn’t have a passport."

These are exactly the kind of problems playing the International Series can identify ahead of time. As additional games are played in London, more problems will present themselves, and resources will be made available to find solutions.

As the NFL gradually puts more divisional games, rivalry games and marquee matchups in London, the International Series will begin to shed the popular conception of an oddity or sideshow and take on a premium air.

Today, teams and fanbases clamor for Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football and Thanksgiving Day appearances. As the quality of London games goes up, teams might actually start fighting for the right to be playing in London during Sunday brunch hours, instead of thumbing their noses and shouting "Not it!"

If the league keeps dangling carrots like the Super Bowl out there to incentivize UK trips, that process will only speed up.

That's critical for Goodell and the NFL. Per Marc Sessler of NFL.com, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft set a timetable for "before the decade is out." That's not a lot of time to build the ticket and television demand to support a franchise, let alone make the logistics and expenses workable for the rest of the league.

If there's anything Howard Hughes proved, it's that one committed visionary with massive resources can accomplish incredible things. Despite Hughes' hubris, despite the breathtaking levels of ridiculousness and impracticality, and despite all the naysayers, the Spruce Goose flew just fine.

Having proved his point about the project's viability, not to mention his and his staff's engineering brilliance, Hughes put the flying boat in storage; today it sits in a museum.

Goodell and the NFL need their London experiment to be a long-term financial success. Whether anyone outside of Goodell, the owners and the league office think that's likely, they're forging ahead—and they're doing so in the smartest possible way.