Asking for the general thoughts of NFL in Europe – do you follow it? Has the recent years of collaboration with football or other commercial avenues changed your mind/impression? Or are you still uninterested as ever? Would be great if you also state your country and your primary sport.

41 comments

  1. I know NFL is sport-related, but without Googling it I do not know whether it is Basket, Baseball, or American Football.

  2. It’s not popular in Finland as a sport or as a league. The popularity of NFL as a league will always be hindered by the time difference anyway. Same with all North-American leagues.

    Personally I’m not very interested in it, I’ve watched a handful of games for whatever reason during my life and it’s good fun to watch, but I just don’t feel fascinated by it.

  3. I don’t know anyone who cares about it. It’s not popular in the sligthest. I’m sure there exists people that watch it here, but it’s very rare. Denmark / Sweden, I personally mostly watch MMA, wrestling, and hockey (SHL, not NHL) I only know Tom Brady, nothing else about NFL at all, and I don’t care to learn more about it

    I think the biggest issues for NFL:
    All the games are broadcast so they align with American time zones.
    The general attitude is “why should I bother to make an effort in getting to know some random American sport?”. Many people already care about football, hockey, or whatever sport they might have already gotten into. Having the desire to get into some random sport for no particular reason is very unlikely. Even if you do watch it, we don’t do school sports like in USA, so you wouldn’t get to play it and for the sport to become part of the general culture.

  4. Chiming in from Finland: I am honestly not aware of collaboration with football. I don’t follow the sport and can’t name a single team. Then again, when I watch sports, it’s usually endurance sports so I guess I’m not in the customer segment to begin with. A couple of times per year I watch a soccer match.

  5. There are individuals who do watch it, so when an NFL fan has been in my friends group (none currently are), I am vaguely aware of it. The NFL is usually only reported on as minor news. I had a look at the sports site of the largest commercial TV station, and while the NFL has its own tab, there is no NFL news on [the main page](https://sport.tv2.dk/).

    I only really watch soccer and handball, and only when its the national squad. My dad will watch any sport – football, handball, skiing, badminton, doesn’t mattter – but I have never seen him watch American football, or baseball or basketball for that matter.

  6. It’s non-existent, most people only know about it through movies

    You can apply that to baseball as well

    Hockey is a tad more popular but barely

  8. NFL is considered an ad-ridden commercialized, boring ass game where the commercial breaks decide when the game breaks are.

    It’s basically the example of a sport ruined by commercial interests.

  9. I follow NFL and have been for like 20 years or so.

    I don’t mind ads, it’s my planned bathroom breaks. I’m not more disinterested. Also watching RZ helps way more. And on Danish Television, if you watch a full game – it’s way more on the analysts than it’s advertisement. So there’s that.

    Denmark. Primary sport – Football (aka Soccer for the uninitiated).

  10. >do you follow it?

    no

    >Has the recent years of collaboration with football or other commercial avenues changed your mind/impression?

    never heard of it

    >Or are you still uninterested as ever?

    yep

    It’s a super niche thing in both Poland in Ireland. In Poland there’s few amateur clubs and close to non coverage. In Ireland they got rugby and gaelic that fill the space

    As for primary sports in Poland it’s football (only men) like over most of the world. There’s no sport which could compete with it. for the next spots it’s more even out between volleyball (both women and men), tennis (both) and ski jumps (only men) (used to be handball as well but fell off with lack of results). There’s also speedway that is super popular but in literally few cities/towns. Basketball is also quite popular as a game, but it doesn’t get broadcasted pretty much at all

    For Ireland i feel football is still no1, but other sports are way closer than in Poland – they would be rugby, gaelic (both men and women), golf and horse sports. There’s also pub “sports” (like darts or rings), but dunno if that counts

  11. NFL.. it is a national holiday in the US where each year a music artist that has paid their dues gets to perform for the whole nation and it somehow has to do with dipping chips into different variations of main courses suspended in cheese or sour cream and watching really long expensive ads.

  12. Some people watch the Super Bowl and American football is on the TV now and again, but overall it’s not really common at all.

  13. I follow it…but I don’t know anyone else outside of internet contacts that do.
    It’s a very niche thing.

  14. Eggthrow is gaining some interest in Europe, but NFL is of no real interest. We have the real football, what Americans call soccer. Why should anybody care, what happens in American sports?

    I personally am not interested in both, or all three: Eggthrow, football, soccer. Whatever.

    Oh, by the way: Do YOU follow HBL? Still needs more attention.

  15. I am ready to bet that if you ask 100 Europeans what they think about NFL, 95+ will ask you what NFL means.

  16. I don’t care about it at all. Most don’t.
    I personally find it quite boring, because of all the interruptions and insanely low percentage of actual action.

  17. Culturally we know it through film and TV, we get a game in London once a season that is well attended, the Superbowl airs in the middle of the night which some people like to stay up late for. Functionally though I don’t know how many people really know the rules, the tactics, or if people prefer it more for the spectacle and as a change from football or Rugby as the main ball sports in the UK. It is very difficult to even attempt to play it due to the amount of kit and organisation needed, but I have seen a society in University which offered an intro to it. I have genuinely seen more people play Quidditch however. It is a fascinating game as it is so intricate, things burst into life and people run around like headless chickens but you start to see people carefully blocking others (off the ball) and one player throw it up field. Even if they make a short amount of ground or catch the ball and run out they can celebrate hard which is interesting. I don’t think it could ever hope to gain much more ground without people actually *playing* the sport, unlike the other way round perhaps where soccer is very accessible and played by American youth.

  18. It is not a sport. It is a showbiz. Did you know that the referee in NFL need to take in to consideration what the expert commentators thinks about their decisions and adjust accordingly to make the tv experience more pleasant. So they have the video referee constantly listening in on what the commentators says and thinks about a situation.

  19. It had a moment in the 80s when one of the four available channels at the time started showing it, and ever since then it’s not unknown but definitely a niche interest. If it’s on TV, it’s a weekly highlights roundup at about midnight, you know?

    I reckon I could go out into the street and ask people to name American football teams, and they might know two or three, probably taken from the Bears, Giants, Dolphins, 49ers, Cowboys and Patriots.

    (That’s still orders of magnitude more popular than baseball or basketball, it must be said)

  20. Probably a bit more accessible than it was years ago. At least watching the Superbowl is something you hear people do.
    Mostly from younger people though. Personally I just know from one person who actively watches it and supports the Steelers, but other than that even the guys that watch more than just soccer don’t often mention it outside the Superbowl.

    It seems to me that it is more of a “Let’s watch that big event” Sport like the Olympics rather than something people follow regularly.

  21. The UK has probably the biggest following for NFL in Europe, followed by Germany, but even so its still very much a niche sport. Football (Soccer) is far more popular in the US than NFL is in the UK.

  22. Belgian here , from Belgium where REAL football is the primary sport : )

    Media talk about NFL once a year, for the Superbowl halftime show. You can often see clips of the artist’s performance, and then a mention at the end like “oh and by the way, team XYZ won the game” like if it was some unimportant detail, and that’s it. Seen from Europe, it’s like if NFL was this ad company that makes a super impressive music show once a year and organizes some kind of sport game before and after but no one cares about it.

    From a Belgian perspective, I think the interest for the sport itself has not really gained ground over the last decade. You can see some kids wearing NFL teams apparel, but I am sure if you would ask them to name a player from that team or even explain what a quarterback does, they would be clueless.

  23. Very niche following in Slovakia/Czechia. We have normal football that we call football and if I want to see a bit more rough variation on that one, I go and watch Rugby.

  25. There are some teams here but it’s dead game for public in Poland. Our top game is football and volleyball. At this point there is no bright future of this sport in our country.

  27. I have been following the NFL for 20-30 years now. Even have a fantasy league. Never played football myself, nor did I have that wish.

    But the general public has no real interest other than the entertainment stuff around the Super Bowl. As a sport it’s pretty niche. And the dutch league is small and strictly amateur.

    NFL Europe folding in 2006 didn’t help either.

  28. It’s a slow boring hybrid of Rugby and Gaelic football. If it wasn’t so heavily marketed, Americans probably wouldn’t like it either.

  29. Tried to watch whole last season, got completely exhausted by all the ads. Felt like I was just being tricked into watching ads instead of sports. Would be a fun sport without all the damn ads and more live strategy between the rounds! People in my country are not used to being bombarded by ads like Americans are so it’s a very hard sell, especially when we can watch football with just a 15 minute break instead.

  30. Straight out of my mind, I didn’t even know what NFL stands for. I would say interest is abysmal. In Poland most popular sports are football, volleyball, tennis and ski jumping.

  31. We have a National Football League in Ireland, but that is for [Gaelic Football](https://youtu.be/TEAbWrdB9XU), one of our national sports. There is not much interest in your form of football, as we also have soccer and rugby too. Field hockey is kind of popular, though not so much ice hockey. We don’t have many ice hockey rinks. Better than field hockey is another stick and ball game on grass that we have, which is [Hurling](https://youtu.be/fgEMvRrOCRI), another one of our national sports. It has been described as a cross between hockey and murder.

  32. In Italy nobody even knows what it is, if not some pc/console gamers.

    I watched some NFL but always found it boring. I can’t even see the puck most of the times.

    I like the fighting very much though, i wish more sports allowed that.

    Most popular sport is BY FAR football.
    Popularity be like:
    1) Football
    2) …
    3) …
    4) …
    5) Formula 1
    6) MotoGP
    7) Tennis
    8) Volleyball
    9) Cycling
    10) Rugby

    edit: forget about the puck sentence, i was thinking of NHL

  33. > state your country and your primary sport

    No one outside of marketing/customer surveys talks like that.

  34. It’s not a sport that many follow in the UK. There’s some fans, but I don’t think it is massive. Probably a bit more in the big cities where there’s US citizens.

    Basketball is probably a bit more popular, at least that is also being played here.

  35. Its popularity is non-existent. We know it exists, but that’s about it.

    I tried watching a few games, it’s way too fragmented for my taste. You get 10 seconds of action followed by 3 minutes of nothingness filled with ads. Then another 20 seconds of action. Just too boring, I can’t see the appeal.

    I can’t even find the “manliness” aspect of it since it’s a very, very light version of rugby. Grown ass man dressed in pads running for 30 seconds it’s simply not entertaining

  36. It will never be a mainstream sport here in Wales as we have rugby union as our traditional national sport (though these days football is probably more popular). Rugby is similar enough to American football that there isn’t really a gap in the market for the NFL to exploit here like there may be in other countries.

    Some people here will stay up to watch the superbowl and will watch the NFL highlights show, but its still a fringe sport. It isn’t played here and isn’t as heavily advertised as it is in e.g. London.

    I wouldn’t say that I’m completely uninterested, as I went to an NFL game when I went to LA and would probably go again if I went to the US again/ if there was an NFL game in Cardiff, however I wouldn’t have any interest in a European league for example, and I could maybe name at most 3 American Football players

  37. I know some people who likes american football but it’s quite rare to watch NFL because of the timezone.

  38. This is the entertainment where people wear a ton of protection and smash into each other to get brain trauma, no? If I’m correct it was never that interesting to me. Pro wrestling has better stories and is more realistic to me

  39. Personally i find it incredibly boring.

    ​

    The few friends I have that are into it, are really into it. Mainly for their friendly fantasy league tho.

  40. No.

    No, because I have no idea who those people are.

    and not really.

    Honestly I cant believe people would chose to play american football if they can have rugby instead. Its a niche sport. Some people will play it, but the popularity will never reach other sports. More people would be willing to play baseball, thought any reason why it has to go for hours too?

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