British fans are buying into NFL — particularly the Super Bowl — like never before

Martin Rogers

FOX Sports Insider

LONDON — Britain’s capital is a rather wonderful place to be at this time of year, if you don’t mind your winters chilly and your beers a little warm.  

The last part is outdated nonsense — room-temp ales long ago ceased to be a common choice. That’s not all that’s changed in modern times.  

Football, American-style, might not yet be as British as tea and crumpets, but has gained so much traction that Super Bowl weekend generated a genuine flurry of interest across the pond, despite being separated from Las Vegas by 5,200 miles and an eight-hour time shift.

And, as the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers got to work on Sunday, with the clock approaching midnight in the United Kingdom, vast numbers of Brits decided to keep calm and carry on watching.

“It sounds strange to say it, but the Super Bowl has become a genuine part of our sporting calendar,” Alan McKinlay, assistant sports editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper and a longtime NFL aficionado who covered 14 Super Bowls, told me. 

On account of his love of American football, McKinlay was once part of a small and lonely niche within British journalism circles. Until relatively recently, the gridiron was regarded with a mixture of confusion and suspicion by the majority of Brits, seen as an odd, foreign game with peculiar rules and strange-sounding team names. 

Much like, if you remember, how European soccer was largely viewed in this country before time, and enlightenment, shifted the metaphorical goalposts and silenced the “soccer haters” into insignificance. 

Last weekend, those visiting central London hotels from America (this writer included), could guarantee that they’d be routinely asked where their allegiance lay for the big game, and no, the match-up in question wasn’t West Ham vs. Arsenal. And yes, just like here, it was rarely long before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce entered the conversation in some shape…

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Publish date : 2024-02-15 18:56:28

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