London Calling

With the NFL season in full swing and fans across America working in new dents on the cushions of their sofas, I thought it might be a good time to look ahead on the schedule and further examine the one game this year that requires team personnel to bring their passports.

The international game has been held in London's Wembley Stadium since 2007, when the New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins, 13-10. This year, the matchup is between the 49ers and the Denver Broncos. The games have always been sellouts, but that's essentially what I feel like the NFL is doing here — selling out. Hear me out on this one.

See, to me, what Roger Goodell and his cronies would call "branding" or "marketing" the game to an international audience, I would call disrespecting the fans here at home. Not to mention the players and coaches who haven't exactly given a perfect report card after being so "fortunate" to have played across the pond in the past. But I'll get to that later.

For now, let's focus on the fact that we love football here in America. We love it so much that it is the most popular sport, making the most money (the Shield pulls in billions, with a "B," annually), and earning the highest TV ratings. That's why greed, hidden behind a thin veil of "branding," seems like it's at the forefront of the International game. Europe already has their sport and it's the other football. They may gobble up the tickets for the annual NFL game, but they do so as a novelty (think the World Cup coming to America). No one should really expect Europeans to be swapping shin guards and 0-0 ties for helmets and Hail Marys any time soon.

In fact, remember NFL Europa? Neither do I. The talent pool was quite shallow (the NFL used it as a spring developmental league) and the league folded in 2007 because it was losing $30 million a season. Europeans have their sport and we have ours. Even the added possibility that Mike Singletary will pull his pants down at halftime again shouldn't be enough to entice this year's crowd to convert to diehards.

Besides the sport belonging to us, my other issue is that it's a regular season game. Now, I know the NHL and MLB have hosted international regular season games in recent years (while the NBA has stuck to preseason only), but the NFL is a different beast. The teams play just eight home games during the regular season, as opposed to 41 in hockey and 81 in baseball. It would be perfectly understandable for an NFL season-ticket holder to be miffed when a team shifts one of its home dates to an overseas venue. This is how the fan gets disrespected in the states.

But good ol' Rog has decided that, well, he doesn't care about that. "The negative is taking the home game away from the fans," Goodell has been quoted as saying. Awesome. So the fans get one less game and the league gets to keep counting their money. The classic win-win ... oh wait ... scratch that.

And it's not that much better for the players and coaches, who have been critical of the extensive travel involved during the middle of the season. I'm sure even a first-class flight with an iPod and the latest "Jersey Shore" DVDs can be draining when it's headed thousands of miles and many time-zones away. Furthermore, Saints coach Sean Payton was critical of the "sloppy" field conditions at Wembley Stadium in 2009 and the logistics of playing a "home" game in London.

So if the players, the coaches, and the season-ticket holders don't like it, why do it? Well, of course, if you are sitting in your air-conditioned house, watching on the 64-inch HDTV, then this doesn't seem to really be a thorn in your side. Additionally, if you are the league, you like expanding the brand while profiting hand over fist.

That's why the annual International game is likely here to stay. In fact, the 2010 season was supposed to have a second game overseas, but it was dropped at the last minute because of the economy and ongoing labor negotiations. It's really too bad. I was looking forward to some bloke in the Mother Land getting completely pissed (for you Yanks, that's getting drunk) at a Seahawks/Chiefs game and wondering aloud, "Why don't we do this more often?"