as a person who actually got asked to play in the European Football league (whatever it was called). Nothing will matter. Until Europe puts football into it’s highschools and colleges they just won’t have enough infrastructure to keep foot ball alive. And I doubt they will ever do this. Soccer is a huge draw over there and is played 365 days a year. (I know this because when I went to Europe I ended up playing soccer instead).

The main thing is this high school, pop warner and college all get people behind the sport so that they’re willing to pay the bucks to support a profesional team. Without them your just importing players, and really how can you get to excited about that.

I’m not sure it’s a question of being ‘truly’ accepted over here, but simply just getting a respectable number of fans. High school sport is woefully underfunded in the UK (unless you go to an expensive public school) and many of the sports which you would consider culturally significant here are hardly played – cricket barely gets a look in in most schools and is actually misunderstood and ignored by a good proportion of the population. Much of the grassroots development in sports occurs in local teams. Players are more often scouted from there rather than schools. From what I understand it’s a very different culture to sports in the states. I don’t know what the system is like in the rest of Europe – somewhat better than the UK I would hope.

Also, it’s a long-term process and has to start ‘somewhere’. There was a brief explosion of interest in the 80’s, during which time most people in the UK were aware of teams like the London Monarchs. However, momentum was lost. Maybe this time we can keep it up.

I don’t imagine football could ever compete with soccer, but then neither does rugby, cricket, tennis or pretty much anything else over here. My point is that there is a market here and it’d make sense for NFL franchises to perhaps try and gain more fans for their teams because there are a lot of people around with no allegiance at the moment.

The problems your run into very quickly are these. First it’s an expensive game to play to your club leagues will have a hard time garnering enough capital to keep a team up. I understand what your talking about I lived in Germain for about 8 years while I was under 17 and never played sports in school it was always at club level.

No the next problem. Money, the same thing will happen now as it did then. As soon as the London Monarchs get a seriousl good QB the NFL will swoop down on them and snatch them up. All becasue the American market will support a lot higher salaries. No one likes thinking their sport is second best. There could be rules about this but seriously how could the do this and still leave Europe not feeling like the ugly kid sister.

Lastly, I believe that if Europe wants foot ball they will have to make it themselves. Having the NFL come over and try and create it for them is not going to work. The NFL is based in America and while they might be able to get Canada into it (a move I highly support) Europe will need to bootstrap itself in. Much like the AFL did all those years ago.

Yeah, I got kinda side-tracked – I don’t think an NFL franchise will be in Europe for a very long time, probably never. A European league similarly has a bunch of problems attached to it.

My original post was that they are a large amount of potential new fans in Europe and I was wondering if it would be prudent for NFL franchises (the Vikings in particular) to get in there early and try and get a share of them.