The Yanks are coming
AN AMERICAN football team will be based in London within five years, a senior politician has claimed.
Tory MP Peter Bone, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for American Football, said that the arrangements are now in place for a National Football League franchise to relocate to Britain.
With the Super Bowl, the NFL’s annual showpiece final, set to take place next week between the New England Patriots and the LA Rams, Mr Bone said an England-based team could win the event one day.
There has been speculation that the team most likely to switch to Britain is the Jacksonville Jaguars, who are contracted to play one of their eight home games in London until 2020.
Team owner Shahid Khan also recently made a £790million bid to buy Wembley Stadium, fuelling speculation that he would use it as the home ground for the team’s games, or a proportion of them.
Even though the Wembley bid was withdrawn, Premier League football team Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium has been set up with a roll-out pitch to allow NFL games to be played there.
Other NFL teams linked with a possible move to the UK are the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Atlanta Falcons, Buffalo Bills and LA Chargers. In the 2019/20 season, four games will be played in England, with two at Wembley and two at Spurs’ new ground in
AMERICAN DREAM: MP Peter Bone
north London. Mr Bone said: “It is now just a matter of a franchise deciding to relocate to this country.
“This happens quite a lot in American Football and is about to happen with the Raiders moving from Oakland to Las Vegas.
“The Government has done a lot to make sure that the tax arrangements and other issues have been put in place to allow the move to happen.
“Now it is just up to the NFL and the franchises to make the decision. But in my view it will happen within five years.”
Mr Bone is a leading Brexiteer and headed the Grassroots Out movement during the EU referendum campaign. He said that the NFL allowing a team to relocate to Britain would be “a huge vote of confidence” in the UK after Brexit.
He added: “At one time it looked like they might consider Germany because there were a lot of American Football fans there, but the UK has now established itself as the main international market for the NFL.”
Seven NFL franchises have switched cities. Arizona Cardinals are most travelled, starting in Chicago before St Louis and Phoenix. Many NFL teams have based franchises according to markets rather than loyalties. The last time American Football sought to establish a foreign base was in 1991 with the World League of American Football. British teams included the London Monarchs and Scottish Claymores but it came to an end in 2007.