American Sports Find Marketing Gold Across Globe

An American invasion of English soccer by National Hockey League owners is underway, and by the time this battle is over, Britain may be fertile marketing ground for not only the NHL but also the National Football League. The owner of the Los Angeles Kings, Philip Anschutz, is a major player in sports, entertainment, and telecommunications in both London and America. Anschutz is responsible for opening the vault and offering David Beckham hundreds of millions of dollars to join his Los Angeles Galaxy soccer franchise. The owner hopes the move will bring increased attention to his club, more important, to Major League Soccer, a league that has labored in relative obscurity for years.

But Anschutz isn't done yet with England. Apparently, it was not enough for him to have played a significant role as a mover and shaker behind the London 2012 Summer Olympics and to have scored the Beckham coup. The owner wants to bring his Kings to London for a pair of games to open the 2007–08 season. In turn, three of Anschutz's fellow NHL owners are becoming heavily involved in English football: the Dallas Stars' Thomas Hicks, the Montreal Canadiens' George Gillett, who purchased the Liverpool Football Club, and the owner of the Colorado Avalanche, Stanley Kroenke, who has cut a marketing deal with the North London-based Arsenal Football Club. The agreement would help to increase the visibility of Kroenke's Colorado Rapids MLS franchise in England, and also carve out a place for Arsenal to establish a marketing foothold in America.

There is an awful lot of activity going on between North American sports marketers and those in England. Nearly two years ago, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner, Malcolm Glazier, purchased a 98% stake in Manchester United — arguably the world's most famous soccer team — for about $1.4 billion. Coincidentally or not, the NFL will export American football to Britain next fall by presenting a regular-season game between the Giants and the Miami Dolphins on October 28.

That the NFL is venturing into London should come as no surprise. In "Sports and Sponsorship," a radio documentary (which included this writer) broadcast on the BBC on October 18, the NFL's senior director of International Affairs, Peter La Pointe, tipped off listeners after he was asked what market the NFL would like to capture next. La Pointe responded, "The real exciting news is in the U.K., that's where we are seeing the flashpoint right now."

The Giants game will be a sellout in Wembley Stadium. Within 72 hours of the early-February announcement of that October 28 contest, some 500,000 requests for tickets had been recorded. Wembley will seat between 85,000 and 90,000 people for the game. The NFL will also play a preseason game in Beijing in August. Still, the league has a long way to go before it can match the National Basketball Association's popularity in China.

LaPointe also pointed out that the NFL hopes it will pick up market share when it plays that preseason game as part of the Beijing countdown to the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The game will be played exactly one year before the opening ceremonies and will be broadcast on NBC (the network is the official broadcast partner of the International Olympic Committee).

The NBA, of course, has in the Houston Rockets' Yao Ming, a player who lends the league a major presence in China. Ming will even play for the host country at the Beijing Olympics. The league's commissioner, David Stern, has even explored the possibility of putting NBA teams in Europe by 2010, but European arenas are older and lack the luxury boxes and club seats essential to owners, making NBA expansion to Europe unlikely for now.

But the NBA will be Europebound again this fall, at least for a moment, sending the Boston Celtics, the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Memphis Grizzlies, and the Toronto Raptors to play a number of preseason games in Italy, Turkey, England, and Spain. The four teams also will prepare for the season by holding training camp abroad.

If Anschutz's Kings do get to play in London, it will be a great boost to English hockey, which has been nothing more than a semi-pro circuit. The NHL is well-entrenched in Russia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden but desires an even more global footprint. Britain is a big catch, and so is China. The Islanders' owner, Charles Wang, who was born in Shanghai, has started an initiative between China and North American hockey programs with the intention of getting a foothold in his birthplace.

Wang's program is small scale compared with what the Yankees' top brass — Randy Levine, Lonn Trost, and Brian Cashman — is planning. Early this month, the Yankees reached an agreement to assist the Chinese Baseball Association in developing players, coaches, and stadiums. The Yankees brand name will be pushed in China — and there is something rather ironical about that. When Bill White was introduced as the National League president during a New York news conference after his February 2, 1989, appointment, Mets owner Fred Wilpon could be heard telling anyone who would listen that he thought China would be the next big global market to be tapped.

Wilpon was right but Levine, Trost, and Cashman beat him to China. Levine wants the Yankees to play in Beijing possibly as early as 2009, in the baseball park that will be used for the Olympics.

North American sports leagues are on the move. The 1990s were a time of domestic expansion and exploding television and marketing dollars, but in the 21st century, American and Canadian franchises have hit a saturation point and owners need to look elsewhere. Major League Baseball held its first World Baseball Classic. The game featured traditional baseball countries like Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, Canada, Caribbean countries, and Australia, but also countries not typically associated with the American pastime like the Netherlands, Italy, and countries in South America. Even Slovakia wanted in last year and the list of countries that would like to be considered in 2009 include Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, Russia, and Israel.

Major League Baseball's scope is truly global. After the league identified Africa as a place where it thinks the sport could work, the Mets' general manager, Omar Minaya, recently took a trip to Ghana, where baseball officials conducted clinics and donated baseball equipment.

Yet while there is an eastward rush to China, for some reason, North American sports owners have been slow in getting to India. India, which will host the 2010 Commonwealth Games, is looking to expand the game of cricket beyond its following in India-Pakistan, Britain, New Zealand, South Africa, China, and the Caribbean. Cricket draws more television viewers from around the world than the Super Bowl, in part because of India's huge population. But the real target continues to be the American market. Still, cricket organizers aren't suffering too much. The International Cricket Council signed a $1.1 billion, eightyear contract with ESPN-Star Sports to televise two world championships and 16 other tournaments globally. And the cricket matches may end up on American cable television; after all, ESPNStar Sports is jointly owned by the Disney Company and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Professional sports leagues like the NHL and MLB are no longer exclusive to North America. Soccer is no longer played somewhere else in the world. NHL owners are making inroads in Britain. The NFL wants to export its version of football to a football-mad country. The NBA will increase its presence in China, and MLB is charting a global course. There is a pot of gold out there for American sports, and the American sports invasion of the mother country (and others) is well under way.