Crazy Stuff

After yesterday's lecture, yours truly hopped on a train (which ended up delayed) to Reading, and just happened to stumble upon one of the most remarkable examples of joint production imaginable - a 12-goal football match between Reading and Arsenal.  It was live on TV, and the 25,000 supporters likely send hundreds of thousands of messages, Facebook updates and Tweets as the hard to believe action unfolded - all testament to the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis that we talked about yesterday!

Today, whilst reliving in my mind the events of last night (even happened to have seats very near to the divide between home and away fans), I came across this article on the NFL in London. You may be aware that each year an NFL match gets played in London - perhaps the starkest example of the difference between sport in North America and sport here in Europe, since the mere suggestion a Premier League match might be played outside England was shot down in flames just a few years ago.

Yet, playing at least one match over here in the UK must be profitable for the NFL, else it simply wouldn't happen.  Not only that, but London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, is engaging in suitably blue sky thinking, and talking about the idea of eventually having a franchise (i.e. a team) here in the UK.  More than likely this is just an attempt to sound really keen, in order to attract more business and attention to London (Boris, as Mayor, doesn't really have very much power at all so has to flex his muscles in other ways).

I suspect you will all be a little too young to recall a similar attempt to get American Football going here in Europe - London Monarchs (see Wikipedia if you're interested).  There may be a residual passion for something a bit different - the real thing, the actual New England Patriots packed with American superstars, but an NFL reserve league, which is what the European variant of NFL essentially became, is unlikely to generate a particularly high level of interest, particularly once novelty wears off.  However, maybe I'm just one big cynic...