The NFL, London, the Jacksonville Jaguars and fandom

Sports fandom is inherently irrational. Why would anyone invest so much emotional energy, time and money into something they cannot control as so many do? The euphoria and catharsis of watching your team win is one aspect of the phenomenon, but mostly, it's about the shared experience of being a part of something larger than yourself. For whatever reason someone is fan, there's someone else someone that shares your feelings, experiences and ideas and that makes this human experience a little less lonely.

So many sports stories are tied to civic pride, the pride in a community that has been passed down from generation to generation like a right of passage. That pride is tapped into and mined for all its worth, for better and for worse, by the sports leagues that use it to make the billions of dollars they make. Sports teams are considered integral parts of their communities, part of a cultural fabric that not only defines a team for its own community, but shines a light on that community elsewhere. Nothing else in the human experience is quite like sports fandom.

Why am I starting a piece about the NFL's London games with this screed on sports fandom? Because when the Jaguars announced they'd be playing two home games in London and not just one, the veneer, the appearance and the image of fandom the NFL is trying so desperately to market, cultivate and produce is shattered. If fandom is a matter of civic pride, how can anyone take pride in a team that plays one quarter of its meaningful games in "its" city somewhere else? How can these teams make so much money off of selling something they themselves can't even sell anymore? And how can this league claim it is about the fans, even when the veneer of that is so easily thrown away for uncertain propositions and unanswerable questions?

The NFL has wanted a team in London ever since it started playing games there in 2007. A team in London means an untapped revenue source is now tapped for all its worth, and the NFL can expand its reach beyond North American shores in a way that other leagues do that they haven't. They believe what they're selling that has made them so much money in North America is going to make them even more in Europe. That's the short of it. 

Every business wants to make as much money as possible, and some do a better job of it than others. Some businesses also hide their inherent greed behind a message that's easily digestable and marketable. For the NFL, that's the fandom story from earlier. Trying to move a team to London is an attempt to build that narrative in a new market, but is at the same taking it away from a place where they had already built it up: in Jacksonville. Take away the logistical hurdles a team would have in being in London, even if they're primarily based in the United States, the labor laws, the currency conversion, the collective bargaining issues, take that all away for a second. 

If the NFL's core business is getting people to spend all this money on their product in season tickets, concessions, merchandise and in time, and its based largely in civic pride, how does moving two of those critical money making dates to another city help a team do that? How does that build a long term fanbase in that city based on said marketing plan when one quarter of those dates are somewhere else, even if the team is branding itself based on the city they're supposedly based in? In other words: how does playing two home games in London make the Jacksonville Jaguars more likely to stay in Jacksonville? How does it help them win a Super Bowl, which is the ascribed goal of every NFL team?

The Jaguars have talked so often about "local revenue", which is marketing speak for ticket sales, sponsorships, things of this nature. The Jaguars are low in this regard not just because their market is small compared to other teams, but under Shad Khan's ownership, the Jaguars are 38-90. Most people in Jacksonville and the surrounding area have decided to not spend bad money on a team that hasn't proven it can win, which is the entire point of running a sports team and the entire point of following a team in the first place. The London games are basically an accounting trick for the Jaguars to increase their local revenue to be "competitive" with other teams, allowing them to invest more money into the region, the team, etc. But there are multiple problems with this line of thinking.

If winning brings in revenue, and moving two home games to London doesn't help the Jaguars in any way get closer to winning a Super Bowl (they're 3-4 in London since 2013), how do these two things line up? They don't. And there is another issue: NFL teams don't need local revenue to make money, certainly not in the way they have become multi billion dollar business on their own, let alone the league as whole. In the Jaguars example, Shad Khan paid $875 million for the team in 2011. It's now worth, according to Forbes, $2.325 billion. His team, though it has a winning percentage of less than .300 since Shad Khan bought the team, and has so many local revenue issues it must play two games in London to cover that shortfall, is now worth $1.5 billion more than Khan paid for it at the very least. This is before the NFL signs new TV deals that could be worth $10 billion combined or more per season all predicated on TV ratings in the United States that forms the backbone of the league's advertising behemoth. How does that improve with a team playing two games in London, especially a team in a market where every game is so crucial? Other small market teams like the Packers, Bills, Bengals, etc. do not seem to have this problem. When it was clear the NFL's Toronto experiment with the Bills failed, they stopped it.

The Jaguars are not any more popular a team in London than they were when they started playing games there, which was supposed to be the entire reason the NFL played games there in the first place. If you weren't a football fan to begin with, why would your entry point to the sport be a team that is this bad no matter where they play? And if you're already a fan of a team, you're not giving up your allegiance just because a team started playing games a little closer to you. If your team is not playing in those games against the Jaguars Jacksonville or London, you're not going. The NFL even gave money to Tottenham Hotspur to retrofit their billion dollar new stadium for NFL games and the Jaguars won't even play there because Shad Khan owns a different London soccer team!

If the NFL's entire marketing empire was built on capitalizing on the irrationality of fandom, the house of cards falls apart when a team is splitting its time between two cities where it cannot plausibly claim to be one or the another. This was the issue with the Chargers, Rams and Raiders in their disastrous moves to their new cities. When it became clear the league and the teams were not operating in good faith with the fans and their cities, people opted out. The Chargers are a lame duck in Los Angeles without a fanbase in the place they left or they place they went to, so much so that their new shared stadium with the Rams is becoming a financial drain on both because PSL's for the Chargers aren't selling even at dramatically cut prices. 40% of Raiders PSL's in their new Las Vegas stadium come from outside Nevada, showing the Raider brand is far stronger than the city they play in, but how long can that last? 

Shad Khan and Mark Lamping have talked all the time about being invested in Jacksonville, but how can they be when the biggest civic asset, its football team, isn't playing 25% of its meaningful games there? Does playing games in London bring any key business to the city of Jacksonville that would help the Jaguars and the city be more successful? Does it show a commitment to the civic and business community that investing in the team is worthwhile with advertising dollars, building projects and down the line a new stadium? The Jaguars seem to think so, but do the other stakeholders, including the fans? Based on the anger coming out of Jacksonville with the news, even though it was expected, it doesn't look like it. It's made worse by Khan somehow expecting a positive reaction from the news, which is the height of tone-deafness. 

So are these London games a not-so-subtle push from the Jaguars ownership to get tax payer dollars invested into new projects designed to make the Jaguars money and will probably not return their investment to the city proper, using the threat of relocation as a specter to get those deals? Is the NFL using the Jaguars as a guinea pig to test the overall viability of a permanent franchise in London with eyes to eventually move them there as they greased the wheels for it? Are both entirely clueless as to how to market themselves locally and abroad? It's not entirely clear. The NFL's history of moving teams from city to city is lurid, and its history of coaxing cities out of taxpayer money for stadium projects that don't create any appreciable benefit is even more lurid. What the league has been really good at for a long time is hiding that greed behind the veneer of fandom, civic pride, love of the game, etc. 

But in recent years, that veneer has been shattered, and this episode with the Jaguars and London is breaking it even further. Good fans and a vulnerable city are being used and abused by people who have far less to lose than they do, and the NFL is complicit in forcing the situation deteriorate to a point where the fans in the city the Jaguars claim to represent don't want them and the place they want to go doesn't want them either. And if the NFL's entire money making empire is built on the irrationality of fandom, then the house of cards quickly falls apart with no way to put it back together again. 

The worst feeling for a fan is apathy. If they're happy or angry, they're invested. Apathy is the opposite of that. When apathy seeps in, the money making machine doesn't work so smoothly anymore. Fandom shouldn't feel like a job, it shouldn't feel like the travails of every day life. Watching a team chronically lose is bad enough, but when the central reasons for being a fan are slowly sucked away, apathy becomes the only way to cope and eventually move on.

Every move the Jaguars have made under Shad Khan has replaced intensity with apathy, love with anger and hope with despair. And what for, a move to London that may never materialize or never work, all for a few more dollars out of a city to build projects that should have been built ages ago? What is the point of that? Fans want to talk about wins and losses, players and coaches, not about tax payer dollars going to a building project that should have been done already because if it is finished, it might keep the team around. 

Shad Khan and the NFL better be careful. They are acting like everything they have, they've made and earned is a given; a rite of life. During the Great Recession, many business acted like that, hence the term "too big to fail". Is the NFL too big to fail? It might not seem it, but based on the way this league and this franchise is treating the London question, they're acting like it. Jacksonville can eventually move on, but can the league?

The NFL can be successful internationally and its Jacksonville franchise can be successful locally without this policy of mutually assured destruction. They don't seem interested in trying. And it is costing the league money, but more than anything else, trust. With that, the entire empire begins to crumble.