Interest in American Football growing, claims UK boss

The managing director of NFL UK, Alistair Kirkwood, believes the record crowd for Sunday’s Jacksonville Jaguars and Philadelphia Eagles game proves UK interest is growing.

The Eagles’ 24-18 victory was the 24th NFL game staged in London since 2008, and the third played at Wembley in as many weeks.

All three of this year’s games – staged on consecutive weekends – have sold out, and Sunday’s contest attracted a crowd of 85,870. The fact we did triple backto-back games for the first time, and also had the challenge of selling our first game very quickly because that game was supposed to be played at the new Spurs stadium, means fan support continues to be incredibly strong,” Kirkwood said.

“That gives us a really good platform going forward and the popularity of the sport seems to be going from strength to strength.”

Earlier this month NFL executive vicepresident Mark Waller said London was still on schedule to be capable of hosting a franchise full-time from 2022.

At the time of those comments Jacksonville owner Shahid Khan had an offer on the table to buy Wembley stadium for £600 million.

But Kirkwood said the withdrawal of that bid did not have any immediate impact on the NFL’s plans.

In terms of how that would have impacted us I think I, like a lot of other people, was just waiting to see if it went through or not,” he said.