| Andrés Martinez
It still feels like a fevered dream I must be having, the consequence of too much time spent researching the globalization of sport. My own university in the desert southwest is heading off to play an American football game at London’s Wembley Stadium. Against Kansas. What next? Go up against Iowa State at Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro? Oklahoma State at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu?
But no, it’s no dream. As English football fans have gleefully chanted for generations when their clubs are in good form: “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, we’re going to Wemb-er-ley." The footballs, they are converging. Believe what you will about whether we’re all rethinking globalization; for the world’s most influential pastime, entertainment, and form of media – that’s football, yes, whichever branch of the faith you follow – it’s full steam ahead.
America developed its own, separate, varietal of football in the late 19th century to help nurture a national identity separate from what was then the default British-shaped global culture. But over the past generation, sport shed its isolation-reinforcing role in American life to become a vital connector. Americans have become far more globally engaged through sport, thanks to the rise of that once-rejected global football within the U.S. and the successful export of our own football and other homegrown sports to new markets overseas.
Consider the stunning success of this summer’s FIFA World Cup, played in 11 NFL temples. More Americans watched the tournament’s Spain-Argentina final on television than have ever watched a baseball or basketball game, despite there being no Americans involved. One of my favorite memories of the summer was watching Dutch fans crowding around a “World Champions” trophy case at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, heralding the Chiefs’ four Super Bowl wins. Bittersweet, no doubt; the Dutch are the most accomplished footballing nation to never win a World Cup, having lost three finals.
Next week the NFL heads to Melbourne, Australia, in its opening week of a season that will also see them play in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Munich, Paris, and London. The idea of NFL teams playing at Real Madrid’s Bernabéu Stadium or Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena still feels a bit like a fabled Catholic cathedral opening its doors to an evangelical Protestant service, even if the world’s top football cathedral has been doing it for a while.
It was Pelé who reportedly christened Wembley the ultimate “cathedral of football,” a fact some English are keen to point out to outsiders, given their lingering anxieties about losing ownership of their national pastime and greatest cultural export (to Brazil, among others).
The NFL started playing preseason games at Wembley as far back as the 1980s, and Thomas Hensey worked on making that happen as a young Texan who’d relocated to London to work in sports marketing. Ever since, he’s wanted to bring the original version of American football – the college game, whose historical roots, fan cultures, and community embeddedness are more akin to English football than what we see in our pro leagues – to Britain. As the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of the Union Jack Classic, he is making his dream come true this month, when ASU and Kansas play the first American college football game in Britain on Sept 19. In a Set Piece conversation we recorded, he called signing a lease with Wembley for four years of these games a “proud moment.”
Wembley was built for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, but was inaugurated the year prior, the same year Los Angeles civic leaders eager to land an Olympics and pull the center of sporting gravity away from the hegemonic control of Britain and Europe debuted their Memorial Coliseum (which pays tribute to an earlier empire). Also known as the “Empire Stadium,” Wembley could accommodate 125,000 spectators and was famous for its incongruous twin white towers flanking the main entrance. It cost £750 thousand to build, and some £757 million to rebuild early this century, when the exhibition towers made way for a dramatic arch hovering over the stadium, and modern hospitality suites brought down its overall capacity.
There is no American equivalent to Wembley. Imagine building a national stadium in Washington, DC that would be the sole venue for all Super Bowls, plus all of college football’s national and conference championship games, and all Team USA games, and you start getting the picture of Wembley’s significance. It also happens to be where England won its first and only FIFA men’s World Cup in 1966. The stadium is home to no single club, but reserved instead for the national team, the FA Cup final (as close as England comes to having a “collective birthday,” as the sports historian David Goldblatt has described it), and the promotion playoffs across all divisions of the English Football League pyramid.
That is why the cathedral analogy is so apt. Wembley is where supporters of clubs from across the nation go on pilgrimages in the late spring of blessed seasons, when their teams are playing for an FA title or promotion to a higher division. Older people across the football-crazed midlands and north of England will reverentially tell you about the days at Wembley that have punctuated their lives. The ritual of a Wembley trip is eloquently captured in the final episode of Netflix’s Sunderland ‘Til I Die, a sports docuseries so moving it drove Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds to acquire the Welsh club of Wrexham, which has since had its own epic Wembley outings.
Shahid Khan, the American owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and London’s Fulham club, offered to buy Wembley from the English Football Association in 2018, but the political uproar was such that he soon had to back down. I was fascinated at the time how people in Britain, even against the backdrop of Brexit, had accepted the radical globalization of their sport, to the point where roughly three-quarters of the English Premier League’s players, coaches, and owners were foreign. But selling off Wembley was a bridge, or an arch, too far. Not surprisingly, comparisons were made to allowing someone to buy Westminster Abbey.
I happened to be at Wembley in 2019 to watch the Los Angeles Rams (who share owners with the EPL’s Arsenal, who play across town from Wembley) take on the Cincinnati Bengals. The game was a festival of Americana, a chance for our sporting fifth column in Britain to make themselves known. Forget about the Bengals and Rams, you could spot any NFL jersey in the mix. It was the flip side of what you see at summer exhibition matches between big European clubs on this side of the Atlantic. The young man sitting next to me, who’d come in from Southampton for the game, was an ardent Carolina Panthers fan.
For those of us who grew up outside the United States and first became acquainted with it from the outside looking in, there is nothing more quintessentially American than marching bands and cheerleaders. That’s when all of us tell ourselves: “Oh yeah, like in the movies.” And that’s the sentiment Thomas Hensey wants to tap into. The NFL is an amazing spectacle, but it’s the college game that offers the full cultural tapestry, which the Union Jack Classic will bring to life on the iconic Wembley Way that brings in fans from the tube stop to the stadium.
I suspect Sparky will be a big hit over there. I just hope there aren’t any Manchester United scouts lurking about, lest the “Red Devils” make a move to sign him in this age of portals and transatlantic football convergence.
Then again, “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, we’re going to Wemb-er-ley."