The whole league was limited to 3-4 countries in Europe, mostly Germany. If you read that Wikipedia article further on, they experimented with some rule changes that attempted to draw in soccer fans. Too bad they did not attempt to make the sport metric as part of their experiments. Maybe they wouldn't have hemorrhaged the $30 million/year that they did, although American Football will always have a difficult time penetrating elsewhere. Never mind the yards, the big problem is the continuous stop-and-go nature of the game. For the 3h of TV time, there are only 13-17 minutes of actual action. To people accustomed to the non-stop 45 minutes of soccer or 40 min of rugby, this is difficult to deal with. The much more fluid sports popular in the US, like hockey and basketball, resonably enough, are popular throughout the world. Of course, it helps that they don't rely on obscure units to measure the game.
On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 8:12 AM, Kilopascal <[email protected]> wrote: > ** > You may find this of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_Europe > > On 29 June 2007, the NFL announced NFL Europa would immediately cease > operations.[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_Europe#cite_note-Fold-0> > > Obviously American football was so unpopular in Europe the only league had > to close. I would suspect the refusal to use metres and the insistence of > using yards played a major role it the unpopularity of American football. > > Glad to see NFL Europa fold. Keep yards out of Europe and the world. > > > [USMA:51946] Re: The Metric Football Game | The Metric Maven > > sunhelen > Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:00:53 -0700 > > Luckily, they are having little success. > > On Thu, Oct 11, 2012, at 19:39, Remek Kocz wrote: > > The sad part is, that the NFL is attempting to export the game to > Europe, at least, in yards only. > > On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 9:03 PM, Kilopascal <[1][email protected]> > wrote: > > I wonder how many people realize that there actually was a metric > American Football game in 1977. > > [2]http://themetricmaven.com/?p=837 > > References > > 1. mailto:[email protected] <[email protected]> > 2. http://themetricmaven.com/?p=837 > >
