Super Bowl Champ Osi Umenyiora on the Importance of NFL’s International Games

Osi Umenyiora has called more international NFL games than most people watching the league this season have attended. He lives in London now. Rich asked him to explain to American fans why the NFL keeps moving regular-season games overseas.

Osi started with the bubble.

"When you're in America, especially in regards to football, you're kind of in this bubble," he told Rich. "You don't really understand the impact it has in all these different places and all these different countries."

The business case followed naturally. The NFL knows it has a massive fan base outside the United States. International fans, Osi argued, are not going to settle for a B-team product. They are paying premium dollars for broadcasts, for tickets, for experiences. The NFL has to give them an actual league game, not an exhibition. The attention span for less than that, in Osi's read, simply does not exist abroad.

"If you're the NFL, you have to give them the best product you have," Osi said.

The structural case Osi made next was about business growth.

"You want to go into these different countries, you're a business, you want to make money in these different countries, you have to give them something back," he said. "And for the NFL, it has been their premium product going to these different places."

He acknowledged the trade-off. American teams lose a home game when their slot gets exported. That can frustrate fans of the team in question. But the league cannot grow as a global product if it never shows up.

Rich asked how international fans consume the league when no game is in their market. Osi pointed to the UK specifically. There is a regular television show running on Sky. There is a new deal with Channel 5. There is the internet, which has made every NFL highlight available at every hour. There is YouTube, which Osi credited as a major engine of fan growth.

"The demand for it has been insatiable," Osi said. "You have to just keep on finding ways to feed that demand. I think we're doing a pretty good job of that."

The image Rich kept returning to was a recent crowd shot from Allianz Arena in Munich. The cameras caught fans wearing Bucs, 49ers, and Packers gear in a stadium where none of those teams were playing.

"I'd bet you none of these folks speak English as their first language," Rich said.

Osi's read on the broader trend was the most interesting moment of the conversation. He pointed out that in the early years of international NFL games, the crowds were jersey-of-any-team mixes. Fans came for the spectacle. They wore whatever they had.

That has changed.

"What you see now is more of a proliferation of the actual team that's playing," Osi said. "If the Jaguars are playing, you see a lot of Jags fans. If the Dolphins are playing, you see a lot of Dolphins fans."

In other words, the international audience is now sophisticated enough that team allegiances actually exist. Fans are not just consuming the spectacle. They are consuming their team.

The growth, Osi argued, is exactly what the international games were designed to produce. The Madrid game returns this year. The Paris game arrives for the first time. Osi said he wants Italy next.

The takeaway he wanted American fans to hold was simple. The product is not being watered down. It is being expanded.