NFL UK

19 degrees and partly cloudy this morning, which is known as 66 degrees and perfect football weather in the states. I'm on the train to London right now to go experience something called NFL UK. For the past few years, the National Football League has been playing one game in London to try and globalise the league. Apparently they throw a huge public party before the game. This year they're expanding to 3 games and the party is today!

There's a website that explains all the activities, and you can pre-register. It took me about 3 different times trying to register before it finally worked yesterday. They shut down one of the most expensive shopping streets in the world and turn it into a huge football party. There will be performance stages, players, music, "American" food and several football activities. 

There are at least 200,000 people here, probably more than that, it's been shoulder to shoulder on the entire street for 6 hours. Such a great feel to the day, you can see almost every single NFL team represented by jerseys that people are wearing. I saw lots of Raiders, Giants, and Dolphins. I was happy to see a number of Redskins jerseys, including good ol Riggo. 

First I stopped at the main stage where they kicked off the event with a great 80s rock cover band. The Brits do love their classic music. 

I walked up and down the entire street, decided to wait in a long queue to get a photo with the Raiders 3 Lombardi trophies. It took just over an hour to get to them, but right as I got close the Raiderettes came out to dance. The trophies were very cool, 3 Super Bowl rings were in the glass case with them. As I walked back to the main stage, Andre Reed was on screen throwing passes to the crowd from the main stage, cool. After lunch I saw Dan Marino speak on the main stage. The Sons of Pitches performed not once, but twice, which was great for me because that's been the name of my fantasy team for several years now.

The English word of the day is "knock on", which means domino effect. I think that phrase ties to the knowledge management aspect of today's event too. If done well, KM helps grow a business, or helps it succeed. Bringing the NFL to the UK is a huge mindset shift for many Brits. If the NFL is working closely with the British culture and leveraging change management, I'd say there's a decent chance it's successful. I'd want to see discussions where the Brits are saying how to make it work here, as opposed to NFL execs coming over and saying what they're going to do. Sure, a little give and take is healthy, but I'd say there's high risk that the NFL wouldn't "knock on" with people here. 

In my humble opinion, I'm sure they've thought of this, I think the best bet would be to form 4-8 teams around the UK, let them battle themselves while the American teams battle in the US. Then have an international Super Bowl where the winners of each league play each other. In English, they'd probably call it the Final Match. I'm sure America would win the first few by a lot, but you'd be surprised how that's actually a good thing. Having local teams would build interest and keep the momentum as opposed to a game or two per year. If you think about it, the NFL is actually moving quite slow by only doing one game per year for several years. They could have just setup a league in year one and let it grow. It'll be fun to see if this slow incremental approach works, I keep hearing slow and incremental is the way most successful things happen.