After 17 years of hosting regular-season games, the city of London is now hoping to land the NFL’s biggest game: The Super Bowl.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, revealed this week that he’s hoping to convince the NFL to put a future Super Bowl in his city. The NFL has held 58 Super Bowls and all of them have been held in the United States, but Khan wants to change that.
“The Super Bowl is really important for us,” Khan told The Athletic this week. “We have a number of American football games and I want it to come here because we want American sports fans in Europe to come to London to watch them, not just go to America.”
Khan had promised in April that he would do everything in his power to get a Super Bowl to England if he was re-elected as mayor and that happened on May 2 when he was voted to an unprecedented third term.
One issue with putting a Super Bowl in London is the time difference. London is five hours ahead of the eastern time zone, which means the game would likely have to kick off around 9 p.m. in London for it to make sense. That would be a 4 p.m. ET kickoff and 1 p.m. PT for everyone on the West Coast.
The last Super Bowl to kick off in the 4 p.m. ET hour was Super Bowl XVI on CBS (49ers over Bengals), which also happened to be the highest-rated Super Bowl in NFL history, so the time change might not be insurmountable (Last year’s game on CBS had the most viewers in television history with 123.4 million, but the 42.1 rating didn’t top the 49.1 rating for Super Bowl XVI).
Even if the time zone situation were to get figured out, it’s still unlikely that London would get a game in the near future.
For one, the next three Super Bowl locations have already been decided, and here’s what that looks like:
Super Bowl LIX (February 2025): New Orleans (Caesars Superdome)Super Bowl LX (February 2026): Santa Clara, California (Levi’s Stadium)Super Bowl LXI…
Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/mayor-of-london-wants-a-super-bowl-in-england-heres-how-the-nfl-feels-about-the-possibility/
Author : John Breech
Publish date : 2024-05-31 16:45:58
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