After 17 years of hosting regular-season games, the city of London is now hoping to land the NFL's biggest game: The Super Bowl.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, revealed this week that he's hoping to convince the NFL to put a future Super Bowl in his city. The NFL has held 58 Super Bowls and all of them have been held in the United States, but Khan wants to change that.
"The Super Bowl is really important for us," Khan told The Athletic this week. "We have a number of American football games and I want it to come here because we want American sports fans in Europe to come to London to watch them, not just go to America."
Khan had promised in April that he would do everything in his power to get a Super Bowl to England if he was re-elected as mayor and that happened on May 2 when he was voted to an unprecedented third term.
One issue with putting a Super Bowl in London is the time difference. London is five hours ahead of the eastern time zone, which means the game would likely have to kick off around 9 p.m. in London for it to make sense. That would be a 4 p.m. ET kickoff and 1 p.m. PT for everyone on the West Coast.
The last Super Bowl to kick off in the 4 p.m. ET hour was Super Bowl XVI on CBS (49ers over Bengals), which also happened to be the highest-rated Super Bowl in NFL history, so the time change might not be insurmountable (Last year's game on CBS had the most viewers in television history with 123.4 million, but the 42.1 rating didn't top the 49.1 rating for Super Bowl XVI).
Even if the time zone situation were to get figured out, it's still unlikely that London would get a game in the near future.
For one, the next three Super Bowl locations have already been decided, and here's what that looks like:
- Super Bowl LIX (February 2025): New Orleans (Caesars Superdome)
- Super Bowl LX (February 2026): Santa Clara, California (Levi's Stadium)
- Super Bowl LXI (February 2027): Inglewood, California (SoFi Stadium)
If London was going to host a Super Bowl, it couldn't come until February 2028 at the earliest, but even that seems unlikely.
During a fan forum in London that was held back in October, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was actually asked about the possibility of putting a Super Bowl in London and although he didn't rule it out, it didn't sound like something that's going to happen anytime soon, if it happens at all.
"It is not impossible, and it is something that has been discussed before," Goodell said at the time, via ESPN.com. "I think that is not out of the question. But at the end of the day, I think right now our formula will stay the same about playing [Super Bowls] in cities that have franchises."
The last part of Goodell's statement is the key part: Right now, the NFL is only looking at giving the Super Bowl to cities that have an NFL franchise and London doesn't have one. England's capital has hosted 36 regular-season games since 2007 and although that number is only going to go up -- especially with the NFL playing more games overseas -- it seems unlikely that a Super Bowl would happen in England in the next decade.
"I think being able to play it in one of our cities -- it's at a huge economic boost to those cities," Goodell said.
London might eventually get a Super Bowl, but if it happens, it will be way down the road and there's a good chance that Khan won't be the mayor of London anymore once it finally happens.
Although London won't be getting a Super Bowl this year, the city will be getting three games with Jets-Vikings, Jaguars-Bears and Patriots-Jaguars all slated to be played in England.
