Is the Super Bowl leaving the United States?
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell left the door open for an overseas Super Bowl when speaking to reporters in London ahead of Sunday’s Jacksonville Jaguars-Chicago Bears game from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
However, the 65-year-old executive didn’t paint that possibility as an immediate priority.
‘We’ve always traditionally tried to play a Super Bowl in an NFL city — that was always sort of a reward for the cities that have NFL franchises,’ Goodell said Saturday. ‘But things change. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that happens one day.’
As leading expert, former ESPN producer and Syracuse University media professor Dennis Deninger told DailyMail.com, an overseas Super Bowl is inevitable. And what’s more, he believes it will be held on the Spurs’ home field – a five-year-old 61,000-seat jewel built, in part, to accommodate NFL games.
Ex-ESPN producer Dennis Deninger (right) thinks Goodell (left) already made his decision
Jet fans enjoy the pregame atmosphere at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on October 6
‘It’s the only stadium of its kind outside the United States, and it’s only five years old,’ Deninger told DailyMail.com.
‘Follow the pattern,’ he continued. ‘You build the big new stadium, you’ve got a great new audience, you get awarded a Super Bowl.’
An Emmy-award winning ESPN producer with a quarter century of experience at the network, Deninger is now professor emeritus at Syracuse University, where he’s the founding director of the sports communications program at the Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Now Deninger has published ‘The Football Game That Changed America,’ which traces the history and social impact of the Super Bowl from its infancy into a future economic landscape that promises to extend far beyond America’s borders.
And in writing this book, Deninger came to an unavoidable conclusion: The Super Bowl will be held in London in the very near future.
‘It’s based upon my years of research on the Super Bowl,’ he said. ‘Tottenham Hotspur Stadium opened in 2019 and it’s the first of the stadiums built purposely for NFL.’
Unlike other locations in Europe, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was built, in part, for the NFL
The pattern, as Deninger pointed out, is fairly straightforward. Super Bowls are awarded to cities that invest billions in building NFL stadiums.
In February it was Las Vegas’ four-year-old Allegiant Stadium. In 2022, it was the two-year-old SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
In fact, of the nine newest NFL stadiums, Minneapolis’ US Bank Stadium is the only one that has not hosted a Super Bowl, and anyone who has spent February in Minnesota could easily explain why that is.
London, on the other hand, has a famously moderate climate, even if it is a little damp.
For that matter, so is Dublin, Ireland, where the NFL is admittedly planning to host an NFL regular-season game in the near future. On Saturday, Goodell said there was ‘no doubt’ Ireland will get an NFL game, although that might not be in the immediate future.
‘I don’t know if it will be next year, but it’s coming soon,’ Goodell said.
