You know why the NBA is bullshit? DEY DON'T CALLS NO TRAVELING!

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So there is no interference in shakes' league?

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there are countless leagues in soccer in england that people watch and follow; the premiership is just the top flight. but here, the NFL is all we have as far as our NFL rules go. AFL, etc., are not linked to the NFL inherently. in other words, lower tier football teams aren't going to play NFL teams. in england, they do. the FA cup, which is like their Super Bowl, pits every league against each other.

NFL Europe failed because at that time there wasn't interest...you could've put the best players there and it wouldn't have mattered. and i still think the english think of our football the way we think of theirs. it's cute, but it won't catch on.

so at least the english aren't arrogant enough to put an EPL team here. it is a nightmare logistically. i can't believe more people don't see this. is there another sport where teams in the same league play each other that are not only 8 hours apart from each other, but 4 or 5 time zones?

if you wanted to start an NFL in these countries and have an American Football World Cup, i could see that possibly working...but not arbitrarily putting teams in european cities that are nowhere near us.

Huh? We have more than just the NFL here. The NFL is a self contained unit though. I don't know why that matters though.
Read up on what the final problem of NFL Europe was. It was how NFL teams were treating it.
Arrogant? Someone from Britain is going to pay over a billion dollars for a franchise. These people aren't dumb. You better believe that they've looked into putting a soccer team in New York that would be eligible for most of the European tournaments besides obviously the one for European countries.
So you admit that American Football could work in Europe.

The logistics are actually quite easy especially if there are two or more teams and two bye weeks. Bye week at the start, go play both teams and then fly home. Spend 2.5 weeks in England and Germany. Send the European teams on 3-4 road trips to America a year. It gets even easier with 4 teams since each of those teams would play 6 games in Europe but that would be way in the future.

The downside, it doesn't work and they move the team to Montreal and just like in Germany now, American football becomes more popular than it was.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

we do not have more than one NFL. even with your needling skills, you can't begin to try and count the...american professional football league. and stop with the "gotcha" crap. i'm not "admitting" or "denying". i'm saying that if there were ever a possibility of this sport expanding to other countries they'd have to have their own contained leagues. and then have a world cup. i could see that working...ahem...IF AMERICAN FOOTBALL CAN CATCH ON.



Are you thinking the football season is going to expand to 30 weeks a year? what about the teams that are actually there? they have to fly to america and back? or are they supposed to fly to america for 4 weeks at a time? how could that possibly work? london would need 8 home games, and would need to travel to the US for 8 weeks. how do you see that working? and what about adding those other teams? So that we can accommodate 4 teams on another continent halfway across the world? Even in baseball, which has a huge international market, does not have MLB teams in Argentina or Venezuela or anything. and that doesn't even really cross any new time zones.

ever thought why we don't have a shared league professional team of any kind in hawaii? and that's part of the US!

It makes...absolutely no sense to try and expand the NFL (the league itself) to other parts of the world. Unless they develop teleporting.

go work up a schedule for an NFL season including London, Madrid, Hamburg, and Paris teams so I can laugh at it. AND you have to come up with their team names too.

as a bonus, come up with the TV contracts that we'd have to share with Sky Sports and Sport 1, which is Germany's sports station.

I wasn't trying to "gotcha". I thought you were saying that the NFL is the only successful football league in the world. They are putting an NFL team in Europe. They don't need other leagues. Now, maybe eventually there would be but it certainly isn't needed. As you have pointed out, we don't need it here. Why would we need it there?
The NFL would simply have to add one more week onto the season and give each team two bye weeks, which probably is going to happen either way. It's actually not too difficult, especially with 2 teams. 8 home games. 1 road game in Europe. That leaves 7 games. Do a road trip of 2 games, 3 games, 2 games for the European teams. Plenty of people travel that much every year for business or vacation. The two bye weeks can be used to make the travel easier.
For those who go over and play, you can either play both teams in succession, or you can have teams only go once and give them a bye week afterwards. That isn't any different than what the Lions and Falcons did this year.

It gets really easy if they have 4 teams in Europe. 8 home games. 3 road games in Europe. That means 11 games on the continent. There are any number of ways each of those teams could play 5 games in the states. 2-2-1. 3-2. That isn't that much different than what European soccer teams have done when they've done their American exhibition tours, or what teams do for the World Cup/Olympics/Other tournaments. Spending 3 weeks in a foreign country staying in fancy hotels and getting paid millions is just a hazard of the job.

The biggest problem, which they are slowly working on, is just getting enough interest built up and teaching them enough to understand.

The same reason that Alabama and North Dakota don't have a professional team of any kind. If Hawaii had the population of London or Berlin they'd have a team.

Sure. This is basically restated from above.
Each of those teams play 8 home games. 3 against the other Euros. 5 against teams from the states. They play 3 road games against the Euros. 5 against teams from the states. This is how the divisional scheduling is now. They go to the States 3 times to play. The first two are 2 game road trips, where they stay in the United States for the middle of the week, and then they get a bye week afterwards. The final road trip is in the final week and always against an East Coast team. If they are a wild card team, they either stay in America to play it on the road, or head home to prepare for it. Otherwise, season is over, or they have a bye week waiting for the playoff game in two weeks.

Alternatively, they could play 3 straight road games, and then two straight road games in the United States. There are a lot of easy ways to get a European team to play 5 games in the United States over 18 weeks, especially if they start or end the season there.

London Monarchs
Madrid Guerreros
Hamburg Hamburgers
Paris Surrender Monkeys

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

They already get the games just like European sports get broadcast here. They'd just get more money. That may be the easiest thing of all.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

The most realistic approach is to add the one team in London, because there’s no evidence yet suggesting that 4 teams are in any kind of immediate future. There hasn’t been testing at stadiums in Madrid or Germany or France. But those are good names. Especially France’s—although I would’ve gone with the Paris Parisians.

According to NFL execs, the effort wouldn’t be to necessarily add a team but to relocate an existing one. So let’s use that example. The consensus seems to be the Jaguars would move. So let’s say they are now the London Jaguars.

So here’s how that would look:

AFC SOUTH

HOUSTON TEXANS
INDIANAPOLIS COLTS
TENNESSEE TITANS
LONDON JAGUARS

London Jaguars actually sounds better than Jacksonville Jaguars, and London already had a team called the Monarchs, so let’s go with that.

Divisional play alone will be extremely arduous. Even if London travels for a 3 week road trip to play against all of their divisional opponents, and then gets a bye week, they still have to fill a schedule of playing an NFC division as well. And it’s not always going to be the NFC East. And not only that, the NFC East has a team in Dallas, which is in another time zone than the other three NFC East teams.

So here’s a schedule for the 2018 London Jaguars. The NFC division would be the NFC East as I mentioned above. So that would at least be the easiest divisional schedule for them. Let’s say their AFC divisional opponent is the AFC North. At least all of the teams play in the same time zone there, and all are EST. Then there are usually two other games from other divisions…like this year the Saints played @ Dallas and they play San Francisco at home. So let’s say the Jaguars have to play Seattle and Detroit that year.

I would assume the NFL would want to pimp out their new fashioned team so let’s give them 4 national appearances. One Thursday, two Sunday nights, and a Monday nighter.

Preseason games would all be held in Europe, at various stadia around the UK.

W1 – HOU
W2 – DAL
W3 – BAL
W4 – BYE
W5 - @ PHI (Sun)
W6 - @ HOU (Thur)
W7 - @ TEN
W8 – BYE
W9 – TEN
W10 – PIT
W11 – NYG
W12 – BYE
W13 - @ WAS (Mon)
W14 - @ IND
W15 - @ CIN
W16 – BYE
W17 – CLE
W18 – DET
W19 – SEA (Sun)
W20 – IND

So the NFL regular season would have to be 20 weeks long for a 16 game season, including 5 weeks for pre season, to allow one bye week in between, so 25 total weeks, not including the playoffs. If you notice, bunching the games before a bye seems to me to be the only fair way to do this. And even then…just look at the schedule. All of those teams would have to travel to London each time. This would only be one year. What about when the Jaguars have to play the NFC West and/or AFC West?

Traveling for vacation once or twice a year and traveling for business are extremely different than traveling for NFL players. The conditioning, routines, training and maintenance that is required would be hell on the players. It would burn them out by midseason. Plus, you’re dragging a season along simply to accommodate one team. While the 4 bye weeks may seem too many, with all that traveling, I think it’s the least you can do. And then you’re talking about possibly messing with momentum and other intangible factors.

I am willing to bet that the NFL shares your mindset. But if you really think about the toll this takes on human beings, it becomes ludicrous. Especially if you want to keep with that “safety of players” mantra, and not allowing them to take some kind of steroid or PED. You’re also probably going to cut an NFL player’s career in half because the wear and tear will be extremely rapid.

And that’s just for one European team…you talk about 4…even starting a new division…Madrid to London isn’t that far (I think it’s 2 and a half hours flight), but Hamburg to London? Barcelona to London? Paris to London? And then they have to travel to the states too?

I realize there’s money to be made. I think the cost is going to be higher than the profit. They might implement it…but I think it will be disastrous.

Sky Sports 2 seems to be the network that televises NFL games for the Brits. They have live games in the afternoon and through the evening on Sundays. For prime time here, a game starting at 8pm would start at 1am there. So a Monday Night Jaguars game would be starting at 1am. If it was a home game for the London team, they'd have to start MNF at 3pm or somewhere around there.

I would think at the very least, it would totally fuck the ratings up.

Having one team there is the least ideal situation but still doable. You made a lot of leaps there that didn't need to be made. Even with one team, you can still do an 18 week schedule with two bye weeks. The thing you have to keep in mind is the obvious solution is to pick someplace in the Northeast to give them a secondary base. We'll use the Meadowlands just for simplicity. So, it's not like they are on vacation. It's like they have multiple places they live, which is what most NFL players do anyways. They have practice facilities and places to live, and I doubt many complaints would be made by family who had to have the tough chore of spending time in London and New York. We're talking about 6 total cross-Atlantic flights in a year.

It would be something like this. They'd have 8 road games. Two 3 game road trips during the season with a bye at the end of each and then a 2 game road trip to end the season(they stay if they make the playoffs and are on the road). If they really wanted to, they could even consider 4 games in Europe, 4 games in America, 4 games in Europe, 4 games in the United States. The key is giving them a place to live and practice in the United States too.

Manchester United played 4 games in 4 different time zones in a little over a week here. They also had many players who participated in the World Cup. World Cup qualifying puts teams all over the place too.

It just works a lot better if you have more than one team, and I think they know it and while they won't say it they know that putting another team(even in England) is the way to go.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

whats worse hindrance to winning??... being a team from london or the cubs having to play so many day games?

The ManU games were just glorified scrimmages for Eurosnobs to lap up. It'd be different for ManU if those games mattered like NFL London games. You could maybe point to midweek Champions League or UEFA Cup games that have them traveling as far as Russia sometimes, but it's not every week and that's seperate from the EPL.

well if you're talking about them having a "second home" here, why bother having them in london? you're going to have london season ticket holders have to travel to NY for 4 of their home games? good luck with that working out.

i made the 4 bye week thing up because i am trying to think of the players' safety, obviously...snicker, snicker.

the problem, too, is that the product is already diluted. expanding the NFL won't help that. there is so much shit in this league right now, it's hard to make a case that the NFL is in any condition to show itself off.

i think you just want jay cutler to play for the paris surrender monkeys.

They'd still play 8 games in London. They'd have a place to return to on those road trips. The Euro soccer teams are planning to do something similar too. If they are in between road games in America they'd return to New Jersey just like the Jets or Giants would on a two game road trip. If I'm a family member of those players, splitting time between London and New York sounds a whole lot better than spending the season living in Cleveland.
The NFL sure is struggling.

Realistically, and I'm talking about building this up for another decade before the decide if a team goes there, the only way it fails is if the game starts to crumble here. I'd be more worried about litigation changing the game more than the perceived issues of having a team in London. If we get a Sunday morning football game by going to London then I want a team in there starting next year.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

you're saying all this because you're a total NFL fanboy. i get that. but there is a lot of suck in the game right now, and i have no idea why it seems so important to anyone to have a european fanbase for this game...but if their best hope is watching years of blake bortles, teddy bridgewater, and the tail end of mannning, brady, and brees' careers...well, hope is all they'll have.

It's about as important as people here caring about soccer. I really don't care if they go to London or not outside of how great Sunday morning football is. It just seems pretty logical with a lot of upside and virtually no downside since a "failed" London franchise would just move to Montreal or Vancouver or Mexico City anyways.

It's easy to say any league is bad. The MLS is barely worth watching. The American World Cup team pretty much sucked in the World Cup but everyone acted like they did some great thing by going 1-2-1 while getting outplayed for a large majority of the actual time. The NBA is filled with terrible teams. MLB is boring, and the games take too long, and the season is too long. And so on, and so on.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

yes but none of those leagues are wanting to expand their respective league to europe by adding teams there.

it's not the same thing with soccer, because there are a ton of other countries where soccer is the number one sport. there is no other country where american football is.

and, unlike the NFL, the EPL isn't looking to place teams in america. the MLS is its own league and has its own cup.

Well, it is harder for those leagues who play a schedule with more games per week. They all are trying to grow the game in other countries though. I think all of them play regular season games in other countries now. This is all the NFL is doing so far. If anything, even saying they want to put a franchise in London helps increase interest.
It is though. Soccer doesn't matter in America right now. Why are they trying to build it up here? Basketball was only big in America once. Now, it is huge in a lot of places.

The MLS is NFL Europe right now. I can promise you that the EPL is considering playing actual meaningful EPL games in New York. They'd be dumb to not be looking into it.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

that's why i said if they wanted this to possibly work to create another league in europe...i still don't think it would because it already failed. soccer is slowly and steadily working...

This plan is definitely better. The stadiums have been full and television ratings and number of games being shown are way up since it started. In 2007, the NFL was the 18th most watched sport on Sky Sports. It is now 6th. Sky Sports expanded the number of games it wanted to show too which means it is working out well for them.
Kind of, but they've said this my whole life.

There are a lot of reasons for concern for MLS though. The league had to buy back a franchise and is struggling with Miami already. The tv ratings are pretty horrible still. The level of competition is not as good as the better leagues around the world. They also will one day have to fairly compensate players rather than setting things artificially low.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Yes, every sport has complications, but IMO the NFL has gone beyond the others. it's slow and way too complicated. I watch because I grew up with it, but it has really become a crappy product.

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EPL in the States



No, I don't think the Premier League is considering putting a team in from the United States.

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Ба́бушка гада́ла, да на́двое сказа́ла—то ли до́ждик, то ли снег, то ли бу́дет, то ли нет.

So why are they playing all these games here just like the NFL is?

They'd be dumb not to consider it.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Would FIFA even let the Premier League put a team in the United States? I think they've kept Scottish teams from joining another country's leagues and only tolerate a US/Canada league because it's the US and Canada.

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NFL to Europe makes sense.

the Premier League is not centrally interested in converting the States to the Premier League brand soccer like the NFL is interested in converting England to NFL brand football. It's just not what they're doing.

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Ба́бушка гада́ла, да на́двое сказа́ла—то ли до́ждик, то ли снег, то ли бу́дет, то ли нет.

If the money is there FIFA would let them put a team on Mars.
They certainly are. Putting a team here may be extreme but even I know how much they are trying to target the United States.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Both FIFA and UEFA wouldn't let it happen. The guys that own Manchester City own the new MLS team in New York, that's how they're doing it. Just like how Americans keep buying EPL teams.

They are already changing how they act after what the NFL has done in London. There is open talk about regular season games in the United States.

If the NFL is successful in putting a team in London, I'd expect them to react similarly.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

A regular season game is much different than a US based team.

I know that nobody asked me, but man I could NOT be any less interested in this conversation.