The NFL has been dancing around a full-time move to London for some time now. It's likely it'll make that leap in the near future, but should it be considering other locations first? Nate Silver of fivethiryeight.com seems to think so.
"If London got first dibs on a team, the NFL would be overlooking a couple of more obvious candidates much closer to home," Silver wrote.
That's not to say that an NFL franchise wouldn't be successful in London – even Silver concedes it might not be a "smashing success," and that London's large population and considerable revenue base would prove profitable to the NFL. Silver also accurately points out that a "London team would not cannibalize much of the fan bases of existing NFL franchises." Avoiding a dilution of fan allegiance across the league is clearly a positive.
But Silver also argues that other locations merit consideration before London.
"The Toronto metro area is highly populous and NFL interest is already reasonably high there," Silver wrote. "I estimate [Toronto] has about 1 million NFL fans – more than the majority of the U.S. markets to host an NFL team. As with the Raptors and Blue Jays in their sports, there could also be some residual gains in NFL interest across the rest of Canada.
"Mexico City ranks even higher. Although only about 7.5 percent of people there are NFL fans, 7 percent of 20 million residents is still 1.5 million NFL fans."
In comparison, while London has a bigger metropolitan area population (10, 150, 000) than Toronto (6, 350, 000), the amount of American football fans based on NFL-related Google searches is significantly lower than both cities. Silver estimates that London has an NFL fan base of just 410,000.
Silver also recognizes that a team in those places would immediately become the top draw, as opposed to stiffer competition from existing NFL franchises.
"In Mexico City, for instance, the Cowboys, Pittsburgh Steelers and Broncos are probably the most popular teams. But searches for those three teams combined represent only 20-25 percent of searches for NFL-related topics as a whole. Contrast that with Columbus, where searches for the Cleveland Browns, Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals represent about 90 percent of searches for the NFL as a whole. That's not to say a Columbus-based team wouldn't pick up some fans of its own, but they might come largely at the expense of the Browns, Bengals and Steelers rather than acquainting new fans with the league.
"Toronto, like Mexico City, has only about 20 percent of NFL fans allocated to one of the three most popular NFL teams there. The Buffalo Bills have sometimes asserted that Toronto is part of their market, but NFL fans in Toronto take only a modest interest in the Bills according to search data and other metrics like merchandise sales."
There you have it– from the only person to ever correctly predict presidential election outcomes (2012) in all 50 states. Toronto and Mexico City would be more viable options for international expansion than London, and the NFL should take note.
