This is not new, as the league has played several exhibition games overseas for the past two decades and more recently, the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks announced that they would play a preseason game in Beijing.



But not only unofficial games are played outside, as San Francisco faced Arizona in Mexico city last year being this one the only regular-season match held on a foreigner land, and which attracted more than 100,000 Mexicans to the Azteca Stadium.

With regular televised games, fans all over the world are hoping to live this experience and Mark Waller; senior vice president of the NFL said that they are now ready for the real thing.

"The preseason games and American Bowl games have worked well to introduce fans to the game, once fans have gotten to know it and understand it, they are very aware that the regular season, playoffs and Super Bowl are the real thing." Waller said.

Waller has received a good response from the owners of the teams, and if everything continues to go well, the plan will be put in March for the 2007 season and there would be a rotation so that each team loses only one home game every 16 years.

One of the reasons overseas games were not so popular for coaches was travel time, but a trip to England or Japan isn’t different than a coast-to-coast trip.

October seems to be the best time to play these overseas games, when bye weeks are always in effect, so league officials say that matches in Europe could be timed in a way that teams returning from them might go into a bye week.

It would be interesting to see how this plan can develop the enthusiasm of people around the globe for American football, as this one, along with baseball, are sports that are followed mostly for the North American audience.