For the 10th straight year the NFL is back in London. What started out as a curiosity for fans on both sides of the Atlantic has become a familiar fixed point on the UK’s sporting landscape. Since 2007 Wembley Stadium has played host to 14 regular season games, 20 teams and 85 touchdowns.
The International Series remains an ongoing experiment. For all the talk of an eventual permanent team in London NFL executives are focused in the short term on proving individual points of principle. At first the goal was simply to demonstrate that one game could successfully be hosted in Britain. Now we are up to three per season and there will be a minimum of four by 2018.
With each visit the league aims to try something new. This year one game is being staged away from Wembley, at Twickenham. More crucial to the long-term future of the series is a subtle point of scheduling. The Indianapolis Colts, after facing the Jacksonville Jaguars this Sunday, will become the first team not to take a bye week after a London visit, returning to host the Chicago Bears on 9 October.
But the most eye-catching innovation in 2016 might not be one the NFL planned. It is widely anticipated that this weekend’s game at Wembley will be preceded – as many others have been this season – by an informal player protest.
The movement began with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who remained seated during the national anthem before a pre-season game against Green Bay. Afterwards he told NFL Media: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour.”
His gesture drew strong reactions on all sides, from the fans who made Kaepernick’s jersey the best-seller on the NFL’s website to the police union that threatened to boycott 49ers games. The NFL took a middle path – its commissioner, Roger Goodell, supporting the player’s right to protest but disagreeing with Kaepernick’s decision to do so and adding that the league “believes strongly in patriotism”.
In the weeks since, a growing number of NFL players have demonstrated solidarity with Kaepernick, including several who will take to the field at Wembley on Sunday. The Colts cornerback Antonio Cromartie took a knee during the anthem before his team’s win over the San Diego Chargers last week. Four Jacksonville players – Jared Odrick, Dante Fowler Jr, Telvin Smith and Hayes Pullard – were reported to have raised their right hands as the Star-Spangled Banner played before losing to the Baltimore Ravens.
Another Jaguar, Allen Robinson, made a ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ motion after scoring a touchdown during the latter game. The gesture has been used prominently by Black Lives Matter protesters in the United States and he told the Guardian he considered it a part of the same conversation that Kaepernick had brought into the public spotlight.
“I think for a lot of guys out here who play professional sports, we’re seeing these things becoming a bigger problem each and every day in the culture,” said Robinson. “So if we can bring as much awareness as possible to it, I’m happy to see guys using their platform to say something.”
Not every player who has protested will have the same motivations but for Robinson the key issue was that of police violence against minorities in the United States. “I think no matter what someone does, if people’s lives aren’t in danger, you don’t have the right to shoot and kill someone,” he continued. “No matter how they look, the demographic of them, the size of them, whatever.”
Odrick, who misses out on joining his team-mates in London due to a triceps injury, told the Guardian by phone that one great frustration had simply been the hostility that many people showed towards Kaepernick raising such issues in the first place.
“In my locker room alone, amongst even black players, the flag means totally different things,” he said. “Because you have people coming from military backgrounds that are black. That have strong feelings and emotions tied to the flag, tied to their family, and tied to the death of close ones as well.
“[The protests] are not something that I think – at least from my observations – are intended as an affront to any service members. It always confuses me when people make it that and only that. That way the real conversation gets lost. And I think the real conversation is something that still needs to continue developing.”
How it all plays into the context of this weekend is unclear. Sunday’s game will be preceded by both the American and British national anthems, inviting the question of whether a player who felt moved to protest might extend his gesture through God Save The Queen.
It is not a question that any player approached by the Guardian on Friday felt able to answer. Robinson said he had no plans to protest at all this weekend and had not spoken to any team-mates about doing so. “But at the end of the day,” he added, “you never know.”
