This past weekend saw Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London host the English Premier League and the American National Football League on the same weekend. The $1.25 billion stadium, which opened last spring, after several delays, was worth the wait. It’s world-class, and their next goal is to host the Premiership and the NFL on the same day.
If they can make that short term objective work, the over-arching long term objective is to get a NFL team relocated to London; as has been part of the vision since the beginning of the project. and it would make a great for home for some NFL team, but who?
How about the Jacksonville Jaguars? The Tennessee Titans? I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but for a good indicator, peruse the free NFL picks against the spread and see who typically loses. The team that gets shipped across the pond is most likely going to be one that finds itself consistently with a losing record. White Hart Lane wants to become the only home to NFL football in London, and not share duties with Wembley Stadium.
This past weekend saw Tottenham Hotspur Stadium host its first ever NFL contest, with the Oakland Raiders beating the Chicago Bears 24-21.
This came the day after Tottenham fell to Brighton & Hove Albion 3-0. The venue has a state of the art, futuristic retractable surface, which means there’s a separate pitch for soccer and another different field for football. It’s cutting edge technology and you can see it in action in this time lapse video of the transition.
“The intention with the design was to avoid the overlay that other stadiums have to go through,” Tom Jones, senior principal at design firm Populous is quoted in the Evening Standard.
“The brief that we got from Daniel and the club was that they wanted a stadium that was perfect for football.
“But he had a great ambition to get the NFL to Tottenham. There are sliding pitches all over the world, but Tottenham had the ambition to be able to host multiple events.”
“So, they wanted to be able to make it happen quickly. Daniel has a great ambition one day, which we all fear, of hosting a double-header of football in the morning and NFL in the evening.”
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly appears on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
You can follow Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com on Twitter here and his cat on Instagram at this link.