NFL Europe Having Trouble (how to make it more popular?)

In a vote that was closer than many had anticipated, and which reflected some strong sentiment against continuing an experiment of mixed results, owners decided Wednesday during a half-day meeting in Washington, D.C., to continue the NFL Europe league.

The vote, however, could not have been any closer and one more owner opposed to the matter would have killed off the springtime league.

On most key issues, like NFL Europe, a three-quarters vote of the league membership, or 24 of 32 votes, is required for endorsement. The NFL owners voted precisely 24-8 to continue NFL Europe for two more seasons. The league has been championed for years by commissioner Paul Tagliabue and sources told ESPN.com on Wednesday night that he had to be persuasive to retain the developmental league.

"We want to keep looking at it," said Pittsburgh owner Dan Rooney. "We feel that there is still potential there on which we can build."

The membership will be asked to decide next year, entering the final season under the new business plan for NFL Europe, to extend it through 2013. There are some owners who still contend that the league, founded in 1991, can realize a profit.

But other owners remain concerned about continuing financial losses, and diminished returns in terms of player development, and told ESPN.com they question the wisdom of continuing to subsidize NFL Europe.

In another matter the owners voted, as anticipated, to award Super Bowl XLI, in 2007, to Miami. It will mark the ninth time the city will have hosted the championship game.

Support for again resuscitating NFL Europe appeared mixed when ESPN.com surveyed several owners the past few weeks. And the Wednesday vote certainly reflected that. The vote next year, on endorsing the league through 2013, could be rather contentious. There is little doubt Tagliabue and NFL Players Association executive director Gene Upshaw, who is in favor of NFL Europe, must buttress support in the coming year.

Said one opponent: "I'm just not convinced of the long-term (viability). The proponents keep telling me I'm short-sighted. Well, my vision is plenty good enough for me to see us throwing good money after something that's had 12 years to work, and hasn't."

With the NFL's three-year business plan for NFL Europe having expired, league owners recently received a memorandum detailing the benefits of overseas play, and the positives of continuing the experiment to globalize American-style football.

Some owners have become weary of investing in a product perceived as stagnant, and which has not created much ripple effect, in their minds. But the proponents of keeping NFL Europe still view as essential the potential for marketing opportunities, and at a time when there are few new revenue streams, along with expanding the NFL's scope as a true entertainment entity.

One stance that likely will not sell, at least with more pragmatic owners, is the contention that the investment in Europe might eventually produce some NFL players. In the recent memo, NFL officials pointed out that other American professional leagues have tapped into foreign-bred talent, and suggested the NFL might someday do likewise.

Countered one NFC personnel chief: "The logic there is totally skewed. Baseball, the NBA, hockey, they draw foreign players because those sports are played in a lot of other countries. But, hey, no one else plays football but us. Other countries are developing the players for those other sports. Us, we're sending players to other countries, hoping they will develop. But we could do the same thing with a springtime schedule played here."

Certainly development of high-profile players, like St. Louis quarterback Kurt Warner, has slowed. There were 257 former NFL Europe players on NFL rosters in 2002, and the number is probably similar this season, but the spring league hasn't produced as many visible stars recently as it did 3-5 years ago.

A few other owners noted the security risks involved in sending American players to Europe, but there were no reported incidents in 2002, and NFL officials feel the threat is not a particularly strong one.

From: http://www.cdi.org/russia/233-15.cfm

November 27, 2002
QUIET! THE GAME'S STARTING!
By Russell Working
Russell Working is a freelance journalist who specializes in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.

For Aleksandr Simanchev, the gear is what won him over: the gladiator-like helmets, the swollen shoulder pads, the perforated jerseys from teams with names like Patriots and Eagles. As a teen, Simanchev first glimpsed the hulking players clashing on a field in Moscow, and he knew he had to get out on the turf and butt heads. Never mind that he had no idea what rules governed the movement of that lemon-shaped ball up the field. He signed up for the city's American Football Youth League.

"I spent the first year not knowing what I was doing because everything's so different," he says. "After my first game, I went home and told my mom we lost. Only later did I find out that we had actually won."

Now 20 and a center on Russia's European championship football team, Simanchev is a part of a growing phenomenon in a land better known for ice hockey and walrus swims. Forget the sport that the rest of the world calls "futbol," in which a sphere is booted up and down a field and occasionally ricochets off somebody s head into a net, to the delirium of stadiums full of Bolivians. These Muscovites are crazy about North America's greatest contribution to the civilization of a mostly indifferent planet: the game of gridiron.

Simanchev plays for the Moscow Patriots, one of two adult amateur teams in town (the other is the Moscow Bears). Throw in the 600 junior- and senior-high-aged youngsters playing in full pads and helmets, and you've got the beginnings of a sports revolution. There are even more than 400 girls high-kicking on the sidelines as cheerleaders. And football is sprouting up elsewhere in the former Eastern bloc -- from Prague to the southern Russian Volga River city of Astrakhan.

Football evolved in American and Canada from common roots in the mid-1800s. The two countries now play on different-sized fields, with variations in the rules and numbers of players. Think of it as a form of rugby in which the players stop after every tackle and talk about what they'll do next (offense and defense huddle separately to strategize). The contact is bruising. Play after play, 22 men (24 in Canada) line up and smash into each other, and so an armature of helmets and pads have been added over the years.

Russians began playing American football in the late 1980s, soon after glasnost opened the Soviet Union to Western influences and ideas, says Moscow Patriots coach Vasilii Dobryakov. The sport has since been nurtured by the National Football League, which established a six-team professional league in Europe (although not yet in Moscow) and has held exhibition games in Japan and Mexico. With the fall of the iron curtain, it seemed urgent to evangelize the football-deprived territory known as Russia.

Perhaps Harry Gamble will one day be remembered as the man who did for football what medieval monks did for Orthodox Christianity in Russia. Gamble is a New Jersey resident who has coached the University of Pennsylvania, served as a Philadelphia Eagles coach and club president, and worked as an executive in the NFL's head office in New York. Now retired, Gamble started visiting Moscow in the mid-1990s to coach, donate used equipment, and provide encouragement.

"Going to Russia was something special, because we'd been adversaries for so many years, and it had been a closed society," Gamble says. "And it was only four or five years after the end of the Soviet Union that we started out there."He still returns regularly, bringing coaches he has worked with in the past (the Russians no longer need equipment donations after National Capital Bank and the pro-Kremlin Unified Russia party agreed to sponsor the team).

The youth football league and the Moscow Patriots share an office crammed with boxes of gear in the northern Moscow neighborhood of Petrovsko-Razumovskaya. When they are not working out game strategies or coaching the younger kids, burly fullbacks and tackles fiddle with football computer games or watch old NFL footage featuring beloved legends such as the Pittsburgh Steelers' Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris.

Surveying the scene, Patriots coach Dobryakov says, "You can call this the main center for the development of American football in Russia."

Russia's youth teams often have to start from scratch in teaching kids the basics. With only 600 youths on teams feeding into the city's two adult amateur teams, the Patriots and Bears have a comparatively small pool of players to draw on.

But Dobryakov has found ways of improving kids skills. He sends the youths to compete against teams from the United States, Canada, Japan, and Europe in an annual international football competition in America. And they have clashed with high-school and Pop Warner teams in Miami, Milwaukee, Chicago, and elsewhere.

The coach himself isn't above learning new tricks. He spent a season with the Allegheny College football team in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Along the way he attended practices, traveled to games with the team, and absorbed strategies. He even got to see a few NFL games, where he was a little overwhelmed by the spectacle.

"The first pro game I saw was Pittsburgh versus Jacksonville," he says. "I didn't see three touchdowns out of five. I was too busy looking around at the stands."

Russian players and coaches admit they are in a disadvantage in a country that is more devoted to soccer and hockey. But Gamble has rounded up coaches who worked with him during past jobs and dragged them over to Russia to advise the players. Although he has retired, the NFL still foots the bill for his travel and expenses.

The NFL has used other clever ways of spreading interest in football. For instance, it flies a Russian broadcaster to the Super Bowl game every year to broadcast the championship match back home.

All this effort has paid off. Last summer, the Russians won the European championship in a round-robin competition among teams from places like the Czech Republic and Germany. The team was especially proud of their 26-20 defeat of Germany in the final game; football has much deeper roots in that country, where American troops have been based for nearly six decades.

Upon the Russian team's return home, Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov held a reception for the football heroes. A pleased if bewildered government promptly honored them with Russia s most prestigious sports title. They are now Master Sportsmen of American Football.

Says Gamble: "When a team like Russia, which has only been doing this for seven years or so, is able to defeat Germany that has played American football for so many years, it's a real feather in their cap."

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