Kansas and Arizona to play at Wembley in Union Jack Classic on Saturday
Kansas will take on Arizona at Wembley in the Union Jack Classic at 5pm on Saturday, with organisers expecting about 60,000 young and noisy fans at the stadium.
College football has rarely been staged in England: there have been as many college football games played in Tanzania and Italy (one) as there have in England, and twice as many in China and Australia. It is nearly 40 years since roughly 6,000 spectators watched Richmond Spiders beat Boston University at Crystal Palace, when the Boston Globe wrote, “The gray, misty ways of Richmond proved far more compatible in the Land of the Overcast Sky.” The 1980s saw American college sports expand with fixtures in Japan, Milan and Dublin, and the College Football Classic at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium has drawn crowds of around 50,000 for the last five years, prompting the NFL to visit the city for the first time last September. In London, two decades of NFL matches have laid groundwork for bringing college football to the city.
“We move a little bit behind the NFL,” says Brett Yormark, the commissioner of the Big 12 Conference – a league of 16 of the most successful teams in college sports. “It’s important for the NFL to open up these markets before we do and develop a fanbase. The NFL have played 42 games in the UK so it seemed to be a mature enough market to bring college football here, versus breaking into a new market that might not have the appetite for the sport or the game. The timing just felt right.”
The decision to stage the game abroad is driven by money and exposure: top coaches earn more than $13m a year and players receive substantial sums for image rights, while Arizona and Kansas pay their squads around $20m a year. Teams in the Big 12 receive nearly $32m annually from broadcasters, with games shown on ESPN, Fox, TNT, CBS, and NBC. “Our media partners really like it when we go global, because it creates a big-event feel that they can capture – and they are in the big-event business,” says Yormark. “Fox will host their whole college football show – Big Noon Kickoff – here in London. It will be the first time they have ever taken that show international. They’re going to be here all week, making this game into something really big, not only here, but back in the US.”
“I’ve always had global ambitions for the conference - it’s good for business,” adds Yormark. “When I was the CEO of the Brooklyn Nets, we took the team to Mexico City, London and China. Football is a global sport. We were presented with an opportunity to come to the UK and took full advantage of it.” Six of the universities in the Big 12 have campuses abroad, and Yormark underlined recruitment and enrollment objectives: “There’s real rationale behind it,” says Yormark. “About 14% of our student athletes are international, so how do you drive enrollment? How do you drive global appeal and fan engagement? All of that helps you to rationalise that going global does matter.”
Ticket prices for the Union Jack Classic have been set at roughly half what NFL International Games cost, and organisers are targeting a crowd of 60,000. “That would be a tremendous number for us,” says Yormark. “We can build on it”. Special family offers and reduced-price tickets for NHS and education workers aim to push attendance above the Big 12’s average last year of 50,000, and Wembley remains commercially viable even if only two-thirds full, a factor cited by promoters and used to justify staging major finals such as the RFL Challenge Cup at the stadium. Several thousand supporters from Arizona and Kansas are travelling to London, and both teams will bring their large marching bands alongside half a dozen performers booked for pre-match and half-time shows. “This isn’t just a game,” say the organisers. “It’s a full-scale celebration of sport, energy and culture: from pre-game tailgate parties and marching band pep rallies, to a half-time show that lights up the stadium.”
The two universities volunteered to stage the fixture overseas, with Kansas proposing to move a home game to London and Arizona agreeing to travel. The timing coincides with Arizona having opened a London branch, running a dozen or so degrees out of a University of London building in Clerkenwell, and many of the student-athletes are travelling internationally for the first time: “About 90% of the student athletes coming over didn’t have a passport,” says Yormark. “For them to enjoy a wonderful international experience, while playing the game they love, doesn’t get much better. The students’ experiences are the most important thing to us.”
“Our goal isn’t just to play here once,” says Yormark. “In sports, you’ve got to have continuity, you gotta build something. If there’s two Big 12 teams playing every year, British fans start gravitating to the Big 12 conference. They get to know our schools, our athletes, our coaches. Our ambition is to take many of our sports globally and take the conference global.”