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 News from Around the Americas | December 2006 
NFL Asks Mexico if Ready for Football
 El Universal
| | Last year, the NFL chose Mexico City´s giant Azteca Stadium for the first of its regular-season games ever to be played outside the United States. |
Miguel Gutiérrez - wearing a Brett Favre jersey and nursing a giant soda and popcorn - nestles into his seat to root for the Green Bay quarterback, his football hero. As the Packers kick off to the Seahawks Monday night, the crowd inside the stadium in snowy Seattle is raucous. And so is the one in the warm, dry movie theater here where Gutiérrez has come to watch the game.
"It´s loud, it´s big. It seems like we might be there," says the 37- year-old who fell in love with the game as a child and regularly attends the Monday night telecasts.
The National Football League is making an aggressive marketing push to make soccer-mad Mexico a football haven, too. In Mexico City, the NFL teamed up with the Cinemex theater chains to show Monday night games live on big screens. The league sponsors youth flag-football tournaments to win young fans. By the time the Super Bowl rolls around, Mexicans will be drinking from beer cans emblazoned with team logos, and finding NFL team stickers in loaves of bread and bags of potato chips.
The NFL´s efforts in Mexico have become a cornerstone in the league´s strategy to win additional overseas fans, from Germany to China. Millions of Mexicans have spent some time in the United States, making Mexico a natural expansion market. Last year, the NFL chose Mexico City´s giant Azteca Stadium for the first of its regular-season games ever to be played outside the United States. More than 103,000 people - including Gutiérrez showed up to see the Arizona Cardinals defeat the San Francisco 49ers - breaking the regular-season attendance record for a single game.
The success of that game has prompted the NFL to schedule up to two regular-season games a year in foreign countries beginning next season. Under consideration for 2007 are Mexico City, Toronto, London, Frankfurt and Cologne, Germany.
The plan represents a big investment - and risk - for NFL team owners who forgo a home game, and all ticket sales that go with it, to send their players abroad. Owners are betting that the overseas games will produce more fans, who will buy team-licensed clothing and mementos. The NFL believes it can grab a bigger share of the US$43 billion international sports market, where the football league is a relatively small player today.
AGRESSIVE MARKETING
Overseas marketing isn´t new for the NFL: The league has played overseas exhibition games since 1986, and NFL Europe, a league of lesser pros that plays in the spring, has teams in five German cities and Amsterdam. But the league now believes its best marketing tool is exporting regular-season NFL games, with all the excitement of having the stars on the field and playing for keeps. The buzz created by these games should lead to increased merchandise sales and television viewers - two sources of revenue that have long since outstripped ticket sales in financial importance.
Against that backdrop, it may be smarter to bring one regular-season NFL game to a foreign capital, than to set up a small expansion league with a less intense level of play.
The NFL is setting its sights on emerging markets: Next year, the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots will play a preseason game in Beijing. The league is considering a foreign franchise in the next 10 years with Mexico City a strong contender because of its proximity to the United States.
"We´re convinced we have the best game," says Mark Waller, a former executive with Diageo PLC, maker of Johnnie Walker whiskey and other beverages, who was hired this year to head an overseas push. "If we can be successful in the U.S., the world´s most competitive market, there´s no reason why we can´t compete elsewhere."
Building a fan base can take generations, so the NFL has started sponsoring youth flag-football leagues around Mexico, Europe, and lately even in China and Thailand, to get kids excited about football from an early age.
With football´s popularity growing in Mexico, Grupo Modelo, the maker of Corona beer and a longtime NFL corporate sponsor in Mexico, is gearing up to sell some 300 million cans of Modelo Especial beer cans that are decorated with the team colors of the winners of the past 10 Super Bowls. Mexico´s biggest bread maker Grupo Bimbo is also readying a Super Bowl season promotion involving collectible team stickers.
100 YEARS OF FOOTBALL
U.S.-style football reaches deeply into Mexican history.
In 1896, a young Mexican student who had studied in the United States challenged a group of U.S. sailors anchored at Veracruz to a football game, according to a perhaps apocryphal story in Alejandro Morales´ "100 years of American Football in Mexico." There was also a Mexican version of Notre Dame´s Four Horsemen backfield of the 1920s: The Cuatro Burros Galopantes - or Four Galloping Donkeys - dominated the backfield at Mexico City´s National Polytechnic Institute in the 1940s. But the game didn´t catch on like soccer.
NFL football became a pastime for rich Mexicans who studied in the United States or who zipped to second homes in Texas, where they would usually root for the Dallas Cowboys.
To some extent, the NFL and Mexican marketers are now trying to use the snob appeal to their advantage. Canada´s Bank of Nova Scotia is issuing credit cards in Mexico City with NFL team logos that it figures will be popular with aspiring middle-class Mexicans.
"It works because we are targeting the same segment that the NFL reaches, the middle and upper middle classes," says Javier Ortiz, director of marketing at the bank´s Mexican unit.
But the appeal of American football is expanding widely. NFL fashions are worn these days even in the dustiest of desert villages. That´s because the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who head north to work in U.S. restaurants, fields and factories often return for the holidays decked out in NFL caps and winter coats purchased in the United States. |
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