Originally Posted by Hawg73
This is something that's been discussed a few times here and you're point is well taken, but I don't necessarily believe that the right team at the right time couldn't be successful over there.
I don't believe that the NFL is holding games over there just to provide a treat to the expatriate Yanks and a few confused Brits looking for a novel day at the pitch. Roger is working on a business plan and he's still trying to prime the pump until his numbers guys say the time is right.
Just a matter of when, not if. Rog is a market guy and a little piece of the London market is a hell of a lot more attractive than the entire JVille market.
I don't believe the flight is all that big of a deal to him, or anybody, really.
There are ways to work the schedule to allow for a little more time to "recover" from sitting in first class luxury for a few extra hours. There are fortunes to be made and empires to build so the working class must suffer a bit. It's not like these guys are in steerage with the riff-raff.
Jet lag is bullshit, anyway. The problem with people feeling out of sorts after a flight is that a person's soul can only travel at a maximum speed of about 110MPH. When travel is faster than that the soul lags behind for a while until it can catch up and reunite with the body. A couple of hours then everybody feels whole again.
I think you're absolutely right, it will be a case of when not if, of this I have no doubt.
As for the market, I'd say England as a whole, primarily, being a small country by comparison to the U.S. and by having reasonably good transport links the fan base would be countrywide rather than a city based one.
And now, here is the elephant in the room!
For a team to have a countywide appeal over here, my own personal view is, what ever the team name is, it should not include London as part of that name, I personally do not believe that's a winner; it's just too centralised.
That elephant by the way, has a twin!
If you were to ask me now which team would make the best candidate to bring their franchise to the U.K. I could tell you without a moments hesitation, it would be the Patriots; why?
The name! You ask UK based Patriot fans why they became fans and here I'm talking about long term committed fans, invariably but not in every case, the true fans will tell you it was because there was an affinity with the name, we identified with a name that had England in it, perhaps a latent reflection of the pride in our own country.
The Patriots also have a pretty strong fan base here at present, so work to increase that fan base capable of supporting the franchise might not be so difficult and if the team name was changed from the New England Patriots to the Old England Patriots, straight away you've tapped into that latent national pride!
I think from a geographical stand point, it makes the most sense of all!
What I've written, amounts to nothing more than my own personal thoughts, maybe slightly of the wall and a little left field, but then, maybe that's just me.
