LONDON — Olaf Orywall and his family came from Berlin. Graham and Erica Smith came from Scotland. Jim Kennelly came from Melbourne, Australia, and a considerable number, like Rondell and Deborah Hannah, came from the United States.
What brought them to London was not the queen or the changing of the guard or the wonders of Shakespeare, but the expanding reach of the National Football League, ever more hungry for the kind of global popularity and income that the world’s “beautiful game,” soccer, represents.
Sunday was Michaelmas Day — the year’s three-quarter mark, in football terms — and normally celebrated with church bells and a goose at dinner, not cheerleaders and American football. But at Britain’s national stadium, Wembley, a sold-out crowd of 83,500 people cheerfully watched a close game, as the Minnesota Vikings won a first victory over the still-winless Pittsburgh Steelers, 34-27.
For Christophe Rousset, 45, a French I.T. specialist living in London, American football appeals “for the strategy of the game,” he said. But as he carried his son Louis, 4, who was dressed in a Miami Dolphins jersey, Mr. Rousset said what he liked the most was the attitude of the other spectators. “There’s a really friendly atmosphere,” he said. “You never have to worry about other supporters giving you grief.”
He was, with nearly a half-million others, wandering the length of a closed-off Regent Street, one of London’s main shopping thoroughfares, on Saturday. The street was a shrine to the N.F.L. and its sponsors, with exhibits, games, burgers and wraps.
There were also areas for children and adults to practice the less fine points of the game, like gawking at the Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders, who were on display. While there were considerable amounts of beer, there was quiet security, too, and lots of families with children and a generally happy, even goofy atmosphere.
During the game, there was the usual kind of entertainment — Gene Simmons of Kiss doing an inevitably off-key version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” soldiers in camouflage uniforms unrolling team colors, flares along the sidelines and, of course, the cheerleaders.
The Steelers, an older, more traditional team founded in 1933, have no cheerleaders. But Neil Lamsdaal, 31; Matt Attwells, 30; and Steve Callaman, 29, had come to Wembley to offer their services. They were dressed in black skirts, yellow knee socks, tight white Steelers T-shirts over large bras and sported wigs of bright pink and platinum blond. “We thought we’d audition,” Mr. Lamsdaal said, waiting with the others in line for some American-style barbecue. “We’d get into the fancy dress.”
Sabrina Jeal, 27, who came with them, said what attracted her “are the different teams and fans coming together.”
“It’s not so hostile as the British game,” she said.
Asked about the mood, a Wembley security guard laughed and said, “If it were our lot, they’d be at each other’s throats, and then blaming us!”
While American football crowds can get surly, the contrast of this game to a British soccer match could not be sharper, said Charles Dagnall, a BBC sports commentator in Leicester and former professional cricketer.
“At a British football match, it’s all tribal,” he said. “No one talks to a stranger. They meet at the pub before, have more to drink at the half and leave straight away.” There is more steady boozing, he said, and the fan who dares stray into the territory of the other team’s fans had best be very careful.
Mr. Dagnall, 37, came to American football by accident, on “the standard British holiday to Florida and Disney World,” when he was overwhelmed by the size of the Tampa stadium and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Now he does a weekly podcast on American football that perhaps 10,000 people download, he said.
“My wife’s not interested, and my mates aren’t interested, but at least I can do the podcast,” he said.
The N.F.L. “leaves no stone unturned,” he said. “You come, and they entertain you.” As a sports commentator, he finds a strong comparison with cricket. “It’s 10 seconds of action and 30 seconds of nothing, so there’s lots of filler.”
American football is not new to Britain. An exhibition game was played at Wembley in 1983, when the Vikings beat the St. Louis Cardinals, and again in 1986, when the Dallas Cowboys of Tony Dorsett and Ed (Too Tall) Jones played the Chicago Bears of Walter Payton, who had just won the Super Bowl. The American ambassador then had a cocktail party for the teams at Winfield House, his residence, and it was a shock to many to see the size of even Mr. Dorsett, a somewhat lightweight running back.
Channel 4, a relatively new, free channel in the 1980s, was showing some games, and the usual British love-hate relationship with the United States developed another angle, giving pub drinkers new debates about comparative violence, mass entertainment, tribalism, authenticity and athleticism. Better than rugby or worse? Too much padding? Too stylized? Too commercialized? Too many breaks for huddling? Too many manhugs and rear-end slaps?
Since then, there have been six other regular-season games here, and most of those debates have been suppressed, if not resolved. But the ready British ambivalence about America and its entertainment was on display in the lead of The Guardian’s article about the game on Sunday: “Amid the flag-waving and fire crackers, the unrelenting bass assault on the eardrums and the apple-pie smiles of the cheerleaders in the gloaming, Wembley was treated to a thriller as... .” In other words, exciting enough for some, perhaps, but not quite our thing.
But by the end of his article, the writer, Sean Ingle, could not help but go a bit soft, calling it a “stirring evening” and adding: “There are those who still sneer at the prospect of America’s national game coming to London on a more permanent basis. But there is clearly an appetite for the sport.”
Adrian Peterson, the Vikings running back who had a superb game, had the quote of the day, when he said, to much British puzzlement, “Oh man, Watford is beautiful.” It was an unusual verdict on a northwestern suburb with a second-division soccer club, known as the Hornets, that is often the butt of jokes.
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