league to start playing multiple regular-season games in Britain in the next few
years – an expansion that could lead to putting a franchise in London.
Goodell said Friday that “every indicator” shows the
British market can support more games and that having a franchise here is of
“tremendous interest” to the league. But he stopped short of giving a timeline
for expanding the NFL’s overseas presence.
“The interest and the enthusiasm for our game continues
to grow, and we want to feed that,” Goodell said. “We want to respond to that by
hopefully bringing more to the UK.”
Goodell spoke at a sports conference Friday ahead of
Sunday’s game between the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers at
Wembley Stadium. It’s the third year in a row the NFL is staging a
regular-season game in London, and the league is now looking into playing at
least two games a year in Britain, he said. Aside from London, Manchester and
Glasgow, Scotland, are being looked at as potential venues.
“I expect that sometime in the next couple of years, we
could be playing multiple games here,” Goodell said. “If we brought more than
one game here, and it continues to have the same kind of enthusiasm and growth
of interest, I think that is about as good of an indicator you can get that it
could successfully support a franchise. And that’s what we’re looking at.”
Staging a Super Bowl abroad, however, “is not something
that is under active consideration,” Goodell said.
The league is considering expanding the regular season to
17 or 18 games, with a possibility for every team to play one game abroad.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft said if the league wants more of the current
franchises to travel internationally for games, the regular season should be
extended so that teams can keep the same number of home games. The Bucs are
giving up a home game this season.
“I’m not sure our fans would appreciate us giving up a
regular-season (home) game, and I know I wouldn’t like to do that. But
eventually I think there’s a chance of that if we expand the schedule,” Kraft
said.
Kraft said placing an NFL team in London “would be the
right thing to do some time in the next decade.”
Goodell said he would prefer a potential London-based
team was a completely new franchise, rather than moving one from an existing
market.
“We would like to keep all our teams where they are,” he
said.
Patriots quarterback Tom Brady didn’t sound too
enthusiastic about playing for a team based in Europe.
“That would be challenging,” Brady said. “But I don’t
see that happening any time soon.”
The league is also eyeing having a team in Los Angeles
again, especially after California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill this
week allowing the construction of a 75,000-seat stadium that developers hope
will lure an NFL team back to the Los Angeles area.
“I think there are some positive developments going on
there,” Goodell said. “But now we have to figure out how to pay for it. And in
our economic system, that is a big challenge. It’s at least an $800 million
stadium.”
He would not venture a guess as to what would come
first, a team in London or Los Angeles.
“I don’t know about the timing as far as the sequence,”
he said. “I would tell you that both markets are of tremendous interest to us.”