Roger Goodell spoke enthusiastically about the NFL’s growing presence in the United Kingdom on Friday, stating that the International Series games played at Wembley Stadium over the last eight years had been better received better than the league had ever anticipated they would be. But the commissioner would not be drawn on the subject of how close the league might be to establishing a franchise in London.
“London has done not only everything that we expected but more than we expected, they are responding to the game better than we ever dreamed with more enthusiasm, more passion,” said Goodell. “You see it every year, the passion, the understanding of the game, every event that we have explodes with interest.”
Three regular season games will be played in London in 2015, and all of them will kick off at 1.30pm local time – making them 9.30am kickoffs for fans on the East Coast of the United States. The NFL experimented with such an early start for the first time when the Atlanta Falcons played the Detroit Lions at Wembley in October, and the experiment has been deemed a success.
It has been mooted that this switch could be another step towards an eventual team in London, since early kickoffs would allow teams to pack up and fly back to the States on the Sunday evening after a game – reducing the impact of travel on their preparations for the next week. But Goodell played down that suggestion on Friday, saying: “I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the long term future, of whether a franchise is there.”
But he did suggest that demand for tickets remained robust, suggesting that all but the last few thousand had already been sold out for the 2015 games.
