January 31, 2008
By Kent Somers
It's hard to imagine the NFL becoming more pervasive in American life. We build our weekends around watching games. We buy video games and pretend we're players. We own fantasy-league teams and draft, trade and cut players as if we were general managers.
We don't want the NFL season to end, and the league has accommodated, providing us with year-round intrigue. We move from the regular season to the playoffs to free agency to the draft to minicamps to training camps like we're on an interstate with no exits.
The NFL is like a 350-pound nose tackle - common sense suggests it can't get much bigger. But it can, and it doesn't have to search far from home to do it. The growth potential among the Hispanic market in the U.S., as well as in Latin America, is huge, and the league has barely started to tap into it.
Like most monolithic organizations, the NFL often moves slowly, and league officials admit they were late in marketing the sport to Hispanics. The NFL's big push, they said, started two years ago when the Cardinals played the 49ers in Mexico City.
It was the first regular-season game outside the United States, and its chief purpose was to get Mexicans, as well as Hispanics living in the U.S., excited about the game.
"Really, we've seen . . . (in the past) two years, an increase in interest in the NFL," said Peter O'Reilly, the NFL's director of marketing, "a growth in ratings, and we've really seen a lot more engagement across the board, even on the business side.
"It's been terrific growth, but it's really just beginning. I think there have been some major inroads."
But it's going to take far more than one game for the NFL to increase its popularity among Hispanics. Soccer is still No. 1 to many of them, although the NFL remains popular among the Hispanic community when judged by television ratings. Among Hispanics, NFL games have accounted for the four most-watched English-language TV programs since September.
But the depth of interest and the passion are things that need to build. According to studies, Hispanic fans are far less likely to play video games such as Madden NFL 08 or to seek more information on the league via the Internet.
No easy sell
Changing that is an important goal for the NFL, because the Hispanic market represents a massive growth opportunity. Hispanics are the largest ethnic minority in the United States, constituting about 15 percent of the population. Since 2000, Hispanics have accounted for about half the population growth in the United States. According to census estimates, the U.S. population will be 24 percent Hispanic by 2050.
But tapping into that market has proved difficult for the NFL. Among Spanish-speaking households in the U.S., football ranks behind several other sports in popularity, including soccer and boxing, according to a recent poll by ESPN Deportes, the network's Spanish-language entity.
That includes potential young fans such as Samuel Ixtabalan, a 14-year-old freshman at Glendale Ironwood High. Ixtabalan moved to the United States two years ago from Guatemala and has tried to learn about American football. He was on the freshman football team but quit after a month because he never got the hang of the sport.
"I didn't understand the rules," he said. "The people here say the sport is very good, but I didn't like it."
Soccer is the most popular sport among many Hispanics in the United States and in most of Mexico, although the NFL has a solid foothold in those markets. Football has been played in Mexico for almost 100 years. Fans fill betting parlors to bet on games, and sellout crowds attend theaters to watch Monday night games. Football is popular in high schools, and there are numerous university teams that play the sport.
The NFL has had offices in Mexico for years and runs a variety of programs in the country, but more needs to be done, said Eric Fisher, a high school coach at the American School in Mexico City.
There is interest in the sport, he said, but it hasn't increased much.
"I don't think they are making any big inroads," he said of the NFL. "As far as the fan base, I don't think it's grown or really shrunk."
Fisher's past coaching experience includes stints as an assistant at Phoenix Sunnyslope High and in NFL Europe. He thinks the sport would grow quickly if the NFL did more at the grass-roots level, such as investing money in high school weight rooms and conducting more coaching clinics.
"If they did something like that . . . they would have fans out the wazoo," he said. "It takes a little bit of investment. All the high schools here have pads, helmets. The biggest thing they don't have is weight facilities, and they need some coaching clinics. The level of coaching is pretty poor - which is good for me."
Complexities of the game
The nature of football presents a barrier to its growth internationally. Soccer and basketball are simpler: Get a ball and some players and you are on your way. Football, with its equipment and complicated rules, takes a large investment of money and time to play.
"That's a huge reason the NBA does well (internationally), and why the NFL has some significant challenges," said Whitney Wagoner, an instructor of sports business at the University of Oregon's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center.
"You've got to get these kids to play somehow. The other thing that's important is they (the NBA and Major League Baseball) have foreign-born players who are stars. That's a huge bridge back to the general populace.
"The examples in baseball and basketball are obvious. People from the home country connect and are proud that Yao Ming is playing."
As the kids become interested in the sport, so will the parents. Studies show that football is far more popular in Hispanic families that have been in the United States for several generations than in ones that have recently arrived.
Roy Lopez, the head coach at Tempe's Marcos de Niza High, knows that firsthand. Growing up in Apache Junction, Lopez said football "was pretty much embedded in my blood." His grandfather played in the Army, and most all of his male cousins and uncles played. At family functions, everyone talked about the game.
"We had no choice," he said. "We performed well or we got an earful."
That kind of passion usually comes only after a few generations of a family have been exposed to the sport. Lopez has seen that as a coach.
Kids from nearby Guadalupe attend Marcos de Niza, but until the past few years, hardly any of them played football, preferring soccer and baseball.
That's beginning to change, said Lopez, who is starting to get a few players each year from the area.
"Instead of going to the park and playing soccer with their cousins, they are taking a football with them, too," he said.
Source: The Arizona Republic
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