Mayor of London wants a Super Bowl in England: Here’s how the NFL feels about the possibility

After 17 years of hosting regular season games, the City of London is now hoping to achieve the NFL greatest game: The Super Bowl.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan revealed this week that he hopes to convince the NFL to hold 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 very important to us,” Khan told The Athletic this week. “We have a lot of American football games and I want that to come here because we want American football fans in Europe to come to London to watch them, not just to America.”

Khan had promised in April that he would do everything in his power to bring a Super Bowl to England if he was re-elected mayor and that happened on May 2nd when he was elected to a unprecedented third term.

One problem with holding a Super Bowl in London is the time difference. London is five hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone, meaning the game would probably have to start around 9pm in London to make sense. That would be a 4pm ET and 1pm PT start for everyone on the West Coast.

The last Super Bowl to start at 4:00 pm ET was Super Bowl XVI on CBS (49ers over Bengals), which also happened to be the best rated Super Bowl in NFL history, so the time change may not be insurmountable (last year’s game on CBS had the largest number of viewers in television history with 123.4 million, but the 42.1 rating didn’t beat Super Bowl XVI’s 49.1 rating).

Even if the time zone situation were resolved, it is still unlikely that London would have a game in the near future.

For one thing, the next three Super Bowl locations have already been decided, and here’s what it 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 were to host a Super Bowl, it could not happen before February 2028, but even that seems unlikely.

During a London fan forum held in October, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was asked about the possibility of holding a Super Bowl in London, and while he didn’t rule out the possibility, it didn’t seem like something that would happen. happen soon, if at all.

“It’s not impossible and it’s something that has been discussed before,” Goodell said at the time, via ESPN.com. “I don’t think that’s out of the question. But at the end of the day, I think right now our formula will remain 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 considering 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 while that number will only increase – especially with the NFL playing more games overseas – it seems unlikely that a Super Bowl will take place in England within the next decade.

“I think being able to play in one of our cities is a huge economic boost for those cities,” Goodell said.

London may eventually get a Super Bowl, but if that happens, it will be in the future and there’s a good chance Khan will no longer be Mayor of London when that finally happens.

While London won’t have a Super Bowl this year, the city will have three games with Jets-Vikings, Jaguars-Bears and Patriots-Jaguars all scheduled to be played in England.