The National Football League continues its lucrative drive to win over United Kingdom fans tomorrow when the New England Patriots [team stats] take on the St. Louis Rams before a sellout 80,000-plus crowd.
The goal is to build the fan base to a scale where American-style football becomes a top five sport in the UK, according to Chris Parsons, a Manchester, England, native and an NFL vice president who has headed its international business since 2008.
"The primary reason for our involvement here is building our branding," Parsons said from London yesterday. "The NFL has been very successful in the U.S., and we've started playing these games and they have been an incredible catalyst for the growth of our fan base."
The UK's Sky Sports television network, which carries the NFL games, ranks it as the seventh most-watched sport during the season.
"We started at 18 or 19 when we first started playing the game," Parsons said.
This is the sixth year that the NFL has scheduled a regular-season game at Wembley, and the league last week committed for the first time to two games next year.
It counts its UK fan base at 11 million — including more than two million "avid" fans — a 32 percent increase in two years. TV viewership has grown 154 percent for Sunday games since 2006, and by 74 percent for the Super Bowl.
Wembley has an exclusive contract for NFL games in the UK for the next five years, and it's not likely the NFL will schedule games outside the UK right now, said Parsons, who oversees NFL offices in Beijing, London, Mexico City, Tokyo and Toronto.
"We want to get the UK market right," he said.
The NFL sets up a 131-foot-long merchandise tent at Wembley that sells jerseys from every NFL team and racks up $1.5 million in sales per game.
"On the day of our game at Wembley Stadium, we'll sell more merchandise than any other sports event in the UK on any calendar day, so we've done really well," Parsons said.
And the Patriots — who beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 35-7 at Wembley in 2009 before 84,254 people, the largest regular season audience in its history — are the most popular team.
UK participation in American football also is on the rise, growing by about 15 percent per year since 2007. And it became a sanctioned UK university sport this year.
Patriots quarterback Tom Brady [stats] hopes the NFL's popularity continues to grow in the region.
"That's why we're here," he said during a London press conference yesterday.
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