Looking for lessons from America's NFL

For most Irish folk, the abbreviation NFL refers to that peculiar gaelic football competition that means both the world and nothing at all to the Irish sporting public, the curious dichotomy of the League being the best chance of success for 90% of inter county teams while also being derided by everyone else as “it's only the League” once the championship get going.

No,  the letters “NFL” refers to a behemoth across the big pond that is not only the biggest, brashest and most extravagant sporting league in the world but probably the most lucrative into the bargain as last year's Super Bowl champions Kansas City Chiefs open the NFL season at 1.20 am this Thursday night, Friday morning to start off five months of madness and mayhem.

I've been a fan ever since the sport first burst on Irish TV screens via Channel 4  in the 80s when “The Fridge” wasn't just what you went to for food but was actually a pretty remarkable star for the Super Bowl winning 1985 Chicago Bears team  - the gigantic William Perry weighed in at 335 pounds and scored a touchdown for the Bears, becoming an overnight sensation all over the world in the year he was drafted.

Grounds for congratulations!

THE LAST POINT

Staying up to watch the Super Bowl became a ritual for me and Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Jerry Rice. Lawrence “LT” Taylor, Doug Williams, Jim Kelly were every bit as famous to me as the stars of the old English First Division, and Montana driving the 49ers down the field to pip Boomer Esiason's Cincinnati Bengals every bit as exciting as anything I'd watch on this side of the pond.

Holidays to the US were taken with the intention of taking in whatever games I  could from the Jets in New York through to the Buccaneers taking on the Packers in Tampa and watching the 49ers beat the tar out of St Louis in the old majestic Candlestick Park, and Super Bowl nights are still a tradition, myself and the brother staying up and trading phone calls to discuss the game into the wee hours of a February morning. 

Over the next few months, I've been glued to The Redzone on Sky Sports every Sunday evening - the single greatest sports show in history as it jumps from game to game from one side of the coast to the other, showing each and every touchdown or goal-line stand in all its glory. 

The sport is as beautiful as it is brutal, the ferocity of the hits perhaps the reason the game is so popular all over the world, a new world take on the Gladiators of old, even if the dangers of concussion and chronic long term brain damage has seen participation numbers drop among young people in recent years.

The National Football League, as Americans term it as if using the full words instead of the abbreviation lends it more gravitas, is often held up as the sport that organisations over this side of the Atlantic can learn most from - be it the imposition of a salary cap to the annual draft that is put in place to ensure competitive fairness and that the rich don't become so big that they obliterate the minnows.

The juxtaposition of the wealthiest and biggest sporting organisation in a country that worships the almighty dollar adopting an ideal that is almost socialist in its intent, be  it the draft that ensures that the weakest team each year gets the first pick of the best talent and or salary caps that ensure nobody is able to horde the best talent are two notions that quite a few fans in this part of the world would like to see the Premier League, professional rugby and even the GAA adopt.

Except it just wouldn't work - the NFL  is a business before it is a sporting organisation and teams are actually “franchises” who can up sticks and leave if the opportunity of a more lucrative market opens up somewhere else across that vast land - it's why the Raiders, once of Oakland, then Los Angeles and then back to Oakland, are now based in Vegas while LA, once without a team for years, now boasts two as the Chargers and  Rams, once of San Diego and St Louis, are now firmly ensconced in the City of the Angels!

It'd be like Liverpool deciding that the only way to compete with Man City or Arsenal was to decamp to London or, in Irish terms, the Leitrim County Board deciding the Green & Gold might be better off exploiting the burgeoning population in west Dublin and north Kildare by plonking themselves somewhere around the Maynooth - Lucan area, an area with a far bigger population than our own county.

The irony is that the increasing American influence on professional soccer in England and elsewhere is seeing those ideas pop up more frequently in recent years where clubs with storied histories will become franchises with no relegation, guaranteed revenues and absolutely no threat of someone like Leicester ever winning it all ever again.

Time to finally see the light

By John Connolly

The European Super League idea  was based on the American franchise system but for that to work, everything  from underage teams right through to professional leagues all over the world, would have to funnel into the “product” and that's not going to happen.

Some will say that professional rugby in this country already operates that system and there's a lot of truth in that but the one major concept I'd take from the NFL and its fellow American sports is the idea that competitive balance has got to be built into any competition if you want to keep the fans coming through the turnstiles.

The Premier League is a virtual monopoly and plaything of billionaires and nation states - Everton, my team, were once known as the Merseyside Millionaires but now the Toffees are struggling to stay afloat while spending over half a billion on a magnificent new stadium that might, just might, allow us to compete a little bit better with the big boys even while knowing we'll never catch them.

Even our own gaelic games, with its imperfect county system that pits Leitrim against Mayo, Kerry against Waterford or the Dubs against Longford, could take that American notion and apply it to current structures because for fans to keep watching, you've got to make it worth their while and nobody but nobody is better than the NFL in doing that!

LEITRIM ROSCOMMON SEVEN BEAT EILISH TO ALL-IRELAND SENIOR CHAMPIONSHIP MEDAL

Not being the font of all knowledge, despite what I might like to think, I have to include a little “Mea Culpa” this week. A few weeks ago in the “Back to the future for Leitrim Dubs”, I said subject to correction, Eilish O’Dowd was the first Leitrim woman to win an All-Ireland Senior Championship medal. Well I was corrected but in the most polite way possible by Geraldine (Reynolds) Foster who told me that the Ballinamore woman was actually the eighth Leitrim woman to win an All-Ireland Senior title as seven Leitrim women helped Roscommon (can you believe it) win the All-Ireland title in 1978!

With no ladies football in Leitrim until the following year, Triona Moran, Peggy Guckian, Bernadette Gill, Elizabeth Gill, Geraldine Reynolds (all Drumsna) and Maeve Fallon (from the Leitrim side of the bridge in Rooskey) helped Roscommon win the All-Ireland when they beat Laois in the decider 2-3 to 0-5. In an era when there was very little organised football for Ladies, the Leitrim seven played with St Barry’s in Rooskey from 1976 to 1978 and also played for the Roscommon U16 & Minor teams during those years.

Apologies for the oversight, it was well before my time with the Observer but our history is important and only right that we acknowledge it.