Is the Super Bowl leaving the United States?
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell left the door open for an overseas Super Bowl when he spoke to reporters in London ahead of Sunday’s Jacksonville Jaguars-Chicago Bears game at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
The 65-year-old director, however, did not portray that possibility as an immediate priority.
“Traditionally, we’ve always tried to play a Super Bowl in an NFL city — that was always kind of a reward for the cities that have NFL franchises,” Goodell said Saturday. ‘But things are changing. It wouldn’t surprise me if that ever happens.’
As leading pundit, 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 gem built in part to host NFL games.
Ex-ESPN producer Dennis Deninger (right) thinks Goodell (left) has 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 have a great new crowd, you get awarded a Super Bowl.”
Deninger, an Emmy-winning ESPN producer with a quarter-century of experience at the network, is now a professor emeritus at Syracuse University, where he is the founding director of the sports communications program at the Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Now Deninger has published ‘The game of football that changed America‘, which charts the history and social impact of the Super Bowl from its infancy to a future economic landscape that promises to extend far beyond America’s borders.
And in writing this book, Deninger came to an inevitable conclusion: the Super Bowl will be held in London in the very near future.
“It’s based on my years of research into the Super Bowl,” he said. “Tottenham Hotspur Stadium opened in 2019 and is the first stadium built specifically for the NFL.”
Unlike other venues in Europe, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was built partly for the NFL
The pattern, as Deninger noted, is quite simple. Super Bowls are awarded to cities that invest billions in building NFL stadiums.
In February it was the four-year-old Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. In 2022, it was the two-year-old SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
In fact, of the nine newest NFL stadiums, US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis is the only one that hasn’t hosted a Super Bowl, and anyone who’s spent February in Minnesota could easily explain why that’s the case.
London, on the other hand, has a famously temperate climate, even if it is a bit humid.
That also applies to Dublin, Ireland, where the NFL is admittedly planning to host an NFL regular season game in the near future. On Saturday, Goodell said there is “no doubt” that Ireland will get an NFL game, even if it may not be in the immediate future.
“I don’t know if it will be next year, but it will be soon,” Goodell said.