written by Jack Wardynski for SPEL: Journalism
While I may be spending four months abroad to immerse myself in new, foreign cultures, I find it difficult to keep myself from indulging in my home country’s most popular pastime. American football is an exciting, dramatic, slightly barbaric–definitely dangerous–sport, but it’s ours, darn it. My hometown Chicago Bears are 4-2 this season, a feat that on the surface may not seem wildly impressive, but for the Bears it feels like a small miracle. Lucky for me, their Week 6 game in London was just a short plane ride away.
As most fans back in the States were still fast asleep, I was riding the London Tube to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. This arena is typically used for the classic English sport, but today it would house a bunch of Americans tossing the pigskin around. A funny thing about the NFL in London is how many expats attend who are not actually fans of either team playing. I made it my mission to find a jersey for each of the 32 teams before I entered the stadium. Bears jerseys were rampant across the city the whole weekend, and I noted Eagles, 49ers, Jets, and Seahawks before I stepped off the train.
There is a certain maximalist quality to American football that permeates into all aspects of the sport. Teams employ a roster of 53 players each, and those players are divided into three different teams within. Unlike most sports, where points are scored one at a time, football awards points in chunks of two, three, six, seven, or eight. Players wear bulky pads and helmets that make them appear more like post-apocalyptic gladiators than athletes. Every Sunday, fans in the stands don ridiculous costumes while cheering the entire game, many of them legends in their respective fanbase, then return to their normal lives the next day as if nothing happened.
Shad Khan’s superyacht, Kismet, parked in the River Thames struck me as an extension of the sport’s megalomaniacal streak. If you were the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and worth somewhere in the tens of billions, wouldn’t you also take your 400-foot pleasure barge across an entire ocean and park it in the heart of a metropolis to watch your 1-5 football team play?
Of course, English football (soccer as we “Yanks” would call it) has its own mania around it which surpasses that of its western counterpart. The Tottenham residents were largely unfazed as the seemingly endless procession of fans traveled north on High Road to the arena. For them, this must have been no different than any other Spurs game day, just with different jerseys. For me, the 30 minute walk was a brand new experience. I’m used to being stuck in cars, jamming up the highway into the city, then spending the better part of an hour hunting for a parking spot that won’t cost an arm and a leg. The chance to walk about and explore the area offered exciting new opportunities. I bought an overpriced sandwich from a street vendor, an even more overpriced commemorative Chicago Bears beanie, and listened to the tranquil tones of religious extremists on every corner warning about the rapture that would surely come if we don’t repent soon (this had something to do with football I suppose).
I joined in with a group of older English fellows who, like me, had taken on the challenge of spotting merchandise for each franchise. I soon narrowed it down to just two teams that I had yet to see: the Tennessee Titans and the Houston Texans. A #8 Will Levis jersey spotted off in the distance made Houston the big losers of my exercise. The Texans are only as old as I am, so I can’t blame them for having subpar international appeal.
At 12:30, the gates opened and the fans started pouring inside. I found my seat behind the south end zone and took in the sights. Despite the Jaguars having games in London every season, Bears fans handily outnumbered them, with the stands blanketed in navy and orange. Playing on the screens in the arena was a PSA-style video explaining the rules of football, and I chuckled to myself realizing how silly the particulars of the game really are when summarized in this manner. After settling in, I watched the players warm up and waited for the opening kickoff.
After a slow start, the Bears found their stride and bested Jacksonville 35-16. After a full week of anticipation, seeing your team score five touchdowns in person makes you believe you are untouchable, unassailable. I felt like I could walk right up to Buckingham Palace and claim it as my own. Luckily, I instead settled for a corner table at a pub down the road and a chicken sandwich. I struck up a conversation with an Englishman, his wife, and a couple of American tourists. The Englishman was recounting his origins with the team, how the famous Super Bowl-winning 1985 Bears captured his imagination as a kid and converted him into a diehard fan, despite never stepping foot in Chicago. I heard stories of other local fans who, pre-Internet, would make international calls to Chicago numbers on game days to ask what the score was.
There are many aspects of football that can do nothing but draw an individual’s ire. The sport itself is violent, with the potential to cause serious physical and mental harm. The draft system is fairly archaic and arguably exploitative of young players entering the league. The whole endeavour, ultimately, is a thinly-veiled cash grab, with major American universities functioning more like professional football franchises with education as a side gig. But on a baseline level, it is truly remarkable how much football, and sporting as a whole, can bring disparate individuals together. There are consistent trends across the world of crime rates dropping in cities when the local sports team is performing well. For me, I doubt I would have found my way to London were it not for my team coming to town. I certainly wouldn’t have ended up in a dingy bar at the end of the night, surrounded by locals from a country brand new to me. At that time, sitting next to a sleeping cat on a stack of speakers, and watching a broadcast of teams playing halfway across the world, I felt the most at-home as I’ve been during my study abroad journey.
