TO WITNESS THE power of American culture, step into a hip coffee shop in a big city outside the United States. The decor will typically have a Brooklyn aesthetic, with exposed brickwork and mismatched chairs; American pop music will play softly in the background; patrons will pore over their MacBooks while sipping overpriced caffè americano. Want to exit Pax Americana? Ask one of those patrons to predict the winner of the Super Bowl, which is taking place on February 11th, and witness their blank stare.
This year the final game of the National Football League (NFL) season pits the Kansas City Chiefs against the San Francisco 49ers. It will be a four-hour extravaganza, with a modicum of sport squeezed in between a concert from Usher, an R&B star, and adverts from America’s biggest corporations. Last year’s edition was watched by 200m Americans, 60% of the population. Within the country, the NFL dwarfs other sports, and even other national obsessions like Hollywood, in terms of interest and cultural heft . Last year 93 of the 100 most-watched TV broadcasts were NFL-related. Outside the country, though, NFL is not just dwarfed, it’s largely ignored.
It is not that the world is averse to American sports. By some estimates, basketball is the third-biggest sport in the world, after football (the real kind) and cricket. Volleyball, another American invention, is played in nearly every country in the world. American football, by contrast, has been a poor traveller.
Many forces can take a sport to new shores, but the most important is the game itself. Football’s global supremacy is due to its simplicity. The required equipment is minimal and location scarcely matters. A pitch is nice, but a street will do. Gridiron is convoluted. There are 11 players on the field, but 53 in a squad. It’s a violent game, difficult for children to pick up, or for out-of-shape folk to return to. Playing it seriously is impossible without expensive protective gear. Some of the rules are baffling, which can discourage novice spectators.
For a sport to matter in multiple countries accessibility is not enough. It needs competitions that include them. Football tournaments such as the World Cup and the Champions League transmit local passion to the global arena. In basketball, where America’s NBA stands apart as the marquee competition, domestic leagues elsewhere are flourishing. They supply the NBA with some of its best players. But no league comparable to the NFL exists outside North America, let alone an international tournament.
Sports stars can be another powerful marketing tool. The exploits of Muhammad Ali helped boxing grow. Michael Jordan accelerated basketball’s global expansion. At one point in the 1990s he was the world’s most famous man, according to a (perhaps apocryphal) survey conducted by Warner Bros ahead of the film studio’s production of “Space Jam”—starring Mr Jordan. The sport’s ties with hip-hop, another hugely popular American cultural export, also helped. American football has yet to find such resonance. For non-Americans, the most recognisable person at this weekend’s Super Bowl will be in the stands: Taylor Swift, the pop star dating Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’ tight end.
All this is not for a lack of effort. The NFL is desperate to expand the game’s fan base. Since 2007 NFL games have taken place each year in London. This past season three games took place in the British capital as well as two in Frankfurt. By 2025 the number of international games will increase to eight, including one in Brazil.
To make the game more accessible the NFL is also promoting flag football—a simpler, less brutal version of the sport that will feature at the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. The NFL also got the Netflix treatment in 2023 with an eight-part series that went behind the scenes of the 2022-23 season. These initiatives show promise. All the games abroad have been near sell-outs. According to the NFL, 56m people outside America watched the Super Bowl last year, 7% more than in 2022.
Serious long-term success will in part depend on the competition, though. Other sports are seeking to expand. Cricket is trying to break into new markets, including America, which will host some games in the Twenty20 World Cup this year. Football is getting even bigger, and has increased the number of teams at its next World Cup finals from 32 to 48. And aggressive global expansion comes with costs. American fans grumble about the NFL games played abroad as this reduces the number they can witness in person. Some point out that the NFL scarcely needs to expand. In 2022 the league earned $12bn, 7% more than in the previous year and comfortably the highest revenue in league sport. But the perennial search for growth may be the most American cultural trait of them all.■
Correction (February 14th 2024): The Los Angeles Olympics are in 2028, not 2024 as we originally wrote.
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