NFL looking for profit conversion from UK games
Call it the reverse British invasion.
In the 10 years the National Football League has played in London, tickets for all but one of the 14 games have sold out, including seats for this season’s games, which start Sunday with the Indianapolis Colts and the Jacksonville Jaguars (left) at Wembley Stadium.
For all that popularity, the games are still losing money, said Mark Waller, the NFL’s head of international development. The productions are extraordinarily expensive, and the league has yet to make enough from UK broadcast rights, ticket sales and sponsorships to offset the costs.
But that’s going to change quickly, Waller said. By continuing to play games in London — and making them free to watch via the BBC — the NFL has succeeded in slowly building a fan base. Half of the fans who went to a game at Wembley Stadium last year had been to a previous football game, and one-third bought tickets to the full series.
With enough fans, Waller said, “media values go up, your sponsor values go up, and the commercial side of the arrangement reaches scale.”
As it is, the price of the UK media rights for the NFL has already doubled since the New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins at Wembley in 2007, and Waller said they will be more valuable when they come up for bid again.
The BBC owns the rights to the London games and the Super Bowl for the next two years; Sky Sports will air the NFL’s US games in the UK through 2019.
“If we continue on the path we are on, there will be no discussion about when the games break even,” said Waller, an Englishman. “If we were to double our media rights again, we would more than break even.”
Tickets sell for around $130 on average, compared with $86 in the US, and with more than 80,000 seats, Wembley is 25 percent bigger than most NFL stadiums.