PHILADELPHIA - Outside, police officers holding machine guns stood watch. Inside, the stadium was jumping. More than 100,000 fans, most of whom spoke not a sentence of English nor understood the game of football, packed Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. Every time anything happened - a pregame field-goal attempt, a throw out of bounds, a timeout - the crowd erupted as if a game-winning play had just been run.
International football. Even between the 49ers and the Cardinals, two of the lowliest teams that season, you had to love it.
Two years after what the NFL considered a smashing success in Mexico City, the league will hold its first regular-season game outside North America when the Giants and Dolphins play today at the new Wembley Stadium in London.
It is a huge undertaking for a league trying to make a dent in a market already flooded by the other American professional sports leagues. The NFL might be the big dog in this country, but overseas, you're far more likely to see an Allen Iverson jersey than aDonovan McNabb one. It isn't an accident. It's decades of work by the NBA. The NHL also has a huge international following, as does Major League Baseball.
The NFL is playing catch-up.
But a player it has become. Although last spring the league folded its developmental overseas league - the last incarnation was NFL Europa - it is committed to building an international presence in dramatic ways.
Last fall, the NFL owners voted to hold up to two regular-season games a year on international soil during the next five seasons. That was a huge deal, even though there will just be one this season and the potential two for next year have not yet been scheduled.
Just last week, the Bills put a resolution on the table to hold one of their eight annual regular-season games in Toronto for the next five seasons. The Chiefs have volunteered to play a "home" game in Germany next season, because as team president Carl Peterson said Tuesday in Philadelphia, "We in Kansas City all "sprechen Sie Deutsches."
And earlier this month, Commissioner Roger Goodell went so far asto speculate that the league's biggest event could be held one day on foreign soil. "There's a great deal of interest in holding a Super Bowl in London, so we'll be looking at that," Goodell said during an event in Scottsdale, Ariz., host of the 2008 Super Bowl,
That seems far-fetched. It's one thing to ask billionaire owners to give up a lucrative home game - with the ticket and beer sales, the parking, the corporate suites - to hike through multiple time zones and play on an otherwise neutral field. It's something else altogether to move the signature event of what has become America's pastime - with all due respect to MLB - to another continent.
The Super Bowl in London? The food would be dreadful.
"We're going step by step," Goodell said last week after the league held its annual fall meeting in Philadelphia. "But the reaction we're getting [in London] is extraordinary."
Goodell spoke Thursday at a sports business conference in London - called "Sport 2020: The Changing Face of the Global Sports Industry" - while flanked by eight NFL owners. "Growth in the future," Goodell told the conference, "clearly means expanding ourpresence in the global sports marketplace. ... The focus of our international strategy now is to present the NFL to the widest possible global audience in new ways."
The first is through live regularseason games abroad. The second is through digital media.
While the Cowboys' Jerry Jones was one of the owners at the conference, he wasn't volunteering to play overseas anytime soon. Next season will be the team's last at Texas Stadium, and Jones said last week that "it would be my focus to give our fans everything we can in the form of regular-season games and preseason games. We wouldn't want to do those kinds of things [next year], and we wouldn't want to be a part of that as we get into the new stadium."
But eventually, every team will have to play overseas. Or at least that is the plan.
The night in Mexico City was electric. Fans sang songs, cheered wildly, and had the old stadium shaking. No one really cared who won or who lost. It was an event, a party, a show.
That's what the league wants. Tens of thousands of new fans to buy jerseys will not hurt, either.
Sports, Pages 30 on 10/28/2007