Owner Robert Kraft told Britain's The Times last week that he believes an NFL team based in London would be a success and that he'd be interested in an ownership stake through his sons if possible. Kraft was in London promoting the team's October game against the Buccaneers. Source: Boston Globe
Kraft, have you lost your mind Could you imagine the expenses of flying to the US eight times a year to play games and vice versa for the other teams.
Kraft is just being a good PR guy here, he is an incredibly smart businessman, and doing what it takes to get the fans on his side to make the Pats game feel as much like a home game as possible, except for the flight and time change of course.
Just move the pats there and instead of new england patriots just call them the england patriots lol.
Beside the fact that I didn't like this idea too, the costs for a flight from i.e. Pittsburgh to San Diego can't be much less. Anyone who thinks a London (or any other place at Europe) will be a success, is dumb. NFL fans from everywhere, traveled to London to see the games, bc it was a rare oportunity to watch live NFL action. If you place a team somewhere here, the interest will drop bc we ain't going to abandon our teams, just to adopt a new one.
If he had an ownership stake in the Patriots and the London team, wouldn't that constitute a conflict of interest?
If your going to have a London based team, this is the only way it could truely work right: - Set up team in Florida (or somewhere on east coast), have mini camp/training camp/HQ all that over there, making the team set up in the states. It would mean they would spend the majority of the year (9 months +) stateside which would appeal to the players. - Home games in batches, have them play four games in London, four games in America etc. allowing them to spend extended amount of time in a set place. Therefore, players of the London team would at max spend 11 weeks outside of America. Obviously away teams would have a bit of a journey, but again, have them play on the east coast the week before so that the following flight would be the equivelant of coast to coast. Whilst it could possibly work in that respect, making the team work in Britain would be extremely hard. In Britain, games are shown on Sky Sports (Which is effing expensive) and draw average viewers of about 50,000 per game during the regular season. Now using that as a benchmark, as well as accounting for who of that would go every week, foreign fans etc then maybe adding some for publicity, we would probably be lucky of drawing maybe 40,000 per game at a stretch. Which would be unacceptable. There just isn't enough interest here and growth has not occured at the rate that was expected after the first Wembley game (There are a lot of reasons for this, but I won't discuss them for now for times sake) to justify putting a team here. In short, a monumental risk which massively outweighs the reward.
