The Super Bowl in London?.....Here's why not.

My previous post in which I defended moving the Super Bowl to London has created a lot of real life discussion. People have been telling me that I'm an idiot a lot lately. Let me say this, I don't actually think the Super Bowl should be played outside of the U.S. I was just taking the unpopular side as an intellectual exercise.

So now, why shouldn't the NFL move the game to London (or anywhere outside the U.S. for that matter)?

The reasons all come down to culture. First, there is the culture of professional sports. The culture of professional sports is such that a person who wants to play professionally as an adult must start preparing for that when they are a child. These days, high level sports are so specialized that by college most athletes are forced to pick one sport and play or train in that sport year round. It's the difference between being an athlete and being a player.

This is true of American football more than any other sport because of the number of players, the complexity of play, the equipment, and the sheer number of rules. Basketball and baseball were able to make inroads decades ago, and are very popular now, because of their relative simplicity. You don't need a lot of equipment. The rules are simple. It is easy to pare those games down to play with only a few people, 3 on 3, 2 on 2 for basketball, maybe 5 on 5 for baseball, etc. Football is much harder to simplify. Even pick-up games are marred with the phrases "5 Mississippi", "One blitz every four downs", "two-hand touch", "two completions", "all-time qb", etc. In order to play you have to know the official rules of football and the modifications. It's something you simply have to grow up doing.

This leads into the second cultural barrier, the culture of a nation. American football is simply not on the menu for kids around the world. We are a young country with young sports. Other countries' national sports, like soccer and hurling as examples, have literally been played for millenia. They are a part of the national and local fabric. The countries and towns have so much pride invested in their teams that anyone who shows any athletic talent is steered towards these sports. Hurling is a great example of this. There is not a professional league for hurling. There are simply teams in each town that play the teams from other towns for pride.

American football may one day be played across the world, but it won't happen overnight. They are doing the right things to make inroads by playing one regular season game and one preseason game abroad. However, the Super Bowl should never be played abroad. The UEFA cup is not played here, for good reason.

- Gabe