5 reasons an NFL franchise in London won’t work

1. Travel logistics

If London was awarded a team, it would have to be placed in either the AFC East or the NFC East. While that would cut down on some of the travel for divisional games, occasionally teams from the West Coast (Raiders, 49ers, Chargers, etc.) would have to fly almost 10 hours and go across a ridiculous eight time zones to play a game in The Swinging City. Forget the insanely long flight, simply reacclimating to the time change would be far too much to ask of a team in the middle of a season.

The New England Patriots are currently the closest team to London and they could make the trip in a little more than six hours, plus a five-hour time difference. That’s still absurd.

Meanwhile, what if London’s team faced back-to-back road games in the United States? Would the players and coaches really want to fly home, then fly back across the Atlantic a few days later? If not, would they just stay somewhere in the U.S. and practice here for nearly two weeks? That makes zero sense from a logistical standpoint.

Forcing teams to travel that far and play a violent game with a very short recovery period wouldn’t be fair to players or coaches. I can guarantee you the product on the field would suffer as well. In the short time the league has been sending games to London we’ve seen that play has been sloppy and disjointed. There’s no reason to believe that would stop.