New Tottenham Stadium to Host London NFL Franchise

The rebuilt White Hart Lane Stadium can be the natural home of a London NFL team in the future.

English soccer club Tottenham Hotspur has agreed on a deal with the National Football League about hosting NFL matches in their new 61,000-capacity stadium. The London-based team’s ground will hold at least two regular season games per season for ten years. It will be like with the Wembley Stadium, where three games are staged in a season currently, however for the future there is a possibility to make the GBP 400 million property the home of a London NFL franchise.

• Tottenham will host min. two NFL games per year
• New stadium will have a capacity of 61,000
• Multi-sport facility to accommodate NFL teams

With US gambling laws are about to change in several states, that would be interesting for American players to wager on a team that plays its home matches in Europe. With London being the greatest melting pot in Europe and the perfect place for having a party, even the sexiest NFL wives of division rivals might be worried when the teams of their husbands are going for away matches to England regularly…

Tottenham and the NFL agreed on a 10-year deal

The National Football League and Tottenham Hotspur agreed on a deal about hosting at least two NFL matches every season in a three-year-long spell in Spurs’ new stadium that would have a capacity of 61,000. The Wembley Stadium has been hosting NFL matches since 2007, and now there are three games staged to London per seasons.

There has been a speculation ongoing for years about a possible London NFL franchise, and now it seems that the league wants to start its overseas expansion in the United Kingdom indeed. The latest deal between the NFL and the club are about individual matches only, however there is a strong possibility of using the new facility as the base of a future NFL franchise.

Tottenham will have a multi-sport arena

Tottenham would originally build a 56,000-capacity arena, but the new plans are about a 61,000 all-seater, multi-sport property. The NFL would benefit from that feature and by this Tottenham would overtake the Wembley and the Olympic Stadium in the virtual race for a future London NFL franchise. The new stadium would have bigger locker room sections and that is crucial for hosting American football matches, as NFL teams operate with a 53-man roster and employ circa 20 coaches, as many of those who bet on sports in the UK might know.

The new Spurs stadium will also have a retractile grass pitch with an artificial playing surface underneath for NFL games, as American football games impacted heavily the playing surface of the Wembley Stadium, where additional issues were experienced as well. For example 5,000 seats had to leave empty, since the spectators wouldn’t see anything of the game because of the teams’ personnel standing all along the sidelines.

Tottenham will expectedly start the 2018-19 Premier League season in their transformed ground, and they might use the Wembley Stadium as their temporary home instead of the Milton Keynes stadium, that is more than a one and a half hour drive from White Hart Lane. Chelsea are also fancy to use Wembley once the reconstruction of Stamford Bridge started, however the Blues are at an earlier stage of the planning process yet.

The FA wants an NFL franchise too

The English Football Association also has a plan about having an NFL team in London, but to make Wembley the home of an NFL team would mean that the home matches of the England international side would probably have to be moved to somewhere else. It could also happen that the future London NFL team would make half of their appearances at the new Tottenham arena and the other half of them at Wembley.

The Wembley Stadium has been hosting NFL matches since 2007, and from 2013 there are three London NFL games per season. In 2012 it was announced that from 2012 to 2014 the St. Louis Rams would play one of their home games at the Wembley. However, as many mobile betting players might remember, they backed out of the deal a year later and have been replaced with the Jacksonville Jaguars, who have an agreement in place about playing one regular season home game there in every year until 2016.