When 'namby-pamby' NFL stars first came to London

The Minnesota Vikings are due to face the New York Jets on Sunday in front of a packed Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but their first London visit more than 40 years ago was a lot less popular.

When the Vikings faced St Louis Cardinals for a pre-season warm-up at Wembley in August 1983, it was the first professional American football game in Europe. The stadium was barely a third full.

It was a case of too much too soon for a promoter hoping to capitalise on the new-found popularity of a sport that had only been shown regularly on British television for less than a year.

Since the NFL's first regular season game overseas in 2007, global interest in American football has continued to grow.

London hosts three games in October, but in 1983 the sport was seen by some in Britain as more of a novelty.

Ahead of the game, the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell was sent along to Wembley to watch the Vikings train on the hallowed turf. He was in for a shock.

“Just look what's happened to it,” he said.

“The goalposts are peculiar, there are funny white lines all across the pitch and an enormous red, white and blue crest in the middle of it; then there are the players.”

While some reports at the time referred to the hulking players as gladiators, the future BBC royal correspondent remained distinctly unimpressed.

“Among British rugger players, there's rather a tendency to regard these Americans as a bit, well, namby-pamby, what with all that padding that they protect themselves with,” he said.

“However, it's as well not to mention that when you meet one of them.”

At Wembley he faced up to 6ft 7in (2.01m) offensive tackle Tim Irwin, who said he wasn’t sure if American football would ever catch on in Britain as “the people have got a lot of great tradition with the soccer and rugby over here”.

Looking ahead to the game when “players with positions like tight end, split end and nose guard will pound the famous Wembley turf,” Witchell noted that the promoter stood to make a heavy loss as fewer than half the tickets had been sold.

The Daily Mirror reported that tickets cost “a staggering £50 for the best seats”.

“That's two and a half times the price charged for the FA Cup final and is the most expensive entertainment ever staged at Wembley,” it said.

Accounting for inflation, £50 in 1983 would be about £165 in today’s money; about £15 more than the cost of a standard standing (non-dynamic pricing) ticket for Oasis at Wembley.

The event was designed to capitalise on American football’s cult following on Channel 4, which had begun broadcasting match highlights a year earlier.

The paper reported promoter John Marshall as saying: "£50 may be a bit high, but the expense of mounting this operation is colossal - it's costing £1m to bring 200 people over."

When it came to the game itself, fears for the state of the Wembley turf were a big feature of some reports.

For the Sunday Mirror, it was about “two tons of imported beef apparently trying to destroy the 60-year-old FA Cup final pitch”.

The paper said it was a game where even soccer’s hard men "Nobby Stiles and Norman ‘Bites Yer Legs’ Hunter would have winced at the tackling”.

The BBC’s Mike McKay observed: “Men who look like all-in wrestlers training for space flight had taken over the sacred stadium, and a crowd of around 32,000 seemed to enjoy the fact.”

To help viewers unfamiliar with the sport, he spotted “some resemblance to rugby football, though the goal posts look like oversized TV aerials”.

He added: “Apparently, the object is for the attacking team to advance in ten-yard bursts towards the opponents' goal line with a series of complicated manoeuvres or plays.

“It’s a slow business with lots of breaks, but it’s rough and it’s tough.”

The Minnesota Vikings would run out 28-10 winners over the St Louis Cardinals, known since 1988 as the Arizona Cardinals.

It might have been a slow start, but it was the beginning of something big.

This year London hosts three international games:

For the second year running, the Jacksonville Jaguars play in two international games, while the New England Patriots return to London for the first time since 2012.

The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium opened in 2019, and is the first purpose-built American football stadium outside the US.

Its grass soccer pitch retracts under the stands to reveal an artificial surface underneath for NFL games. The stadium also has larger changing rooms to accommodate American football squads of more than 60 players.

As part of efforts to develop international players, the NFL Academy at Loughborough allows student-athletes aged 16 to 19 to combine their education with intensive American football training and a life skills programme.

The sport has travelled a long way in the UK since those early days.