Henry Hodson was fifteen years old when he wrote a letter to the NFL asking for a job.
Not an internship application through a portal. A letter. Handwritten, sent to an office in London, from a kid who'd fallen in love with a 45-minute highlight package on Channel 4 — the new fourth television channel in the UK, which had launched into a Sunday evening landscape where the other options were religious programming, antiques trading, and, this is real, dogs herding sheep. Against that competition, NFL highlights were appointment viewing. A country that had never seen American football looked up and said, well, compared to the other thing on, this looks pretty interesting.
That letter got a response. They needed help with the American Bowl in Berlin — a preseason game, the Giants against the Chargers, summer of '93 or '94. Hodson, now the general manager of NFL UK and Ireland, showed up as a teenager and spent a brief, probably ill-advised period on Lawrence Taylor duty. LT had just retired. He was the face of the European promotional push. Putting a fifteen-year-old in charge of LT's schedule was not, as Henry put it, the way that should've been handled. Help arrived quickly.
But that moment — the Channel 4 highlight package, the letter, the Berlin trip, LT — that's the whole episode in miniature. Because what Hodson spent the next thirty years building is the infrastructure to manufacture that exact experience at scale. The question the NFL is trying to answer right now, the one that connects the London games to the Global Markets Program to NFL Academy to flag football in British schools, is this: how do you build a second Channel 4 moment in thirteen countries simultaneously? How do you make someone fall in love with a sport they've never had reason to think about?
The answer the league landed on is simpler and harder than most people realize.
You don't sell the sport. You sell the team.
The insight at the center of the NFL's international strategy is one that took them longer to articulate than it probably should have. Fans don't bond with leagues. They bond with teams, and through teams, with players. Nobody in the UK woke up one morning and decided to love the NFL as an institution. They loved the Bears, historically — there's a large Bears fan base in the UK that predates any formal international push — because somewhere along the way the Bears became their Bears, and that loyalty compounded over decades.
The Global Markets Program formalized what was already happening organically. Thirty-two teams, given the license to choose international markets, invest in them, and build local fan bases. The Dolphins looked at Miami's Hispanic population and decided their international strategy was to become the team of record for every family member back home in Colombia or Mexico or Spain. The Steelers have Irish ownership heritage, so when the league wanted to put a game in Dublin, it was a straightforward conversation. The Eagles are going to Australia in part because Jordan Mailata is from there, and the logic is the same one that made Linsanity matter to the NBA in Asia — you follow the player, then you follow the team, then you follow the sport.
Hodson put the mechanism plainly: it's much more likely that you'll become a big fan of the sport if you have a favorite team or a favorite player. You're not gonna fall in love with the NFL brand. That sentence is the strategy document for international expansion, reduced to one line. You don't lead with the shield. You lead with the face.
The traveling circus problem
There's a version of international NFL expansion that doesn't work, and the league seems clear-eyed about what it looks like. They call it the traveling circus — you show up, you play a game, you take the money, you leave, and five years later there's no fan base in that city, just a memory of a Sunday that felt different.
The games are actually the smallest piece of the strategy, which surprised me when Hodson laid it out. He described seven pillars that the NFL thinks it needs to execute simultaneously to grow a market: the games themselves, media reach, the Global Markets Program team investment, localization and cultural relevance, year-round presence, participation at the youth level, and local heroes — players from that market who are actually suiting up in the NFL. The game is one of seven. Not the biggest one.
What's underneath that list is a theory about permanence. You can't buy fandom with a single event. You build it with 365 days of presence — highlights on social, podcasts, the draft airing, Sky Sports carrying games through the night, flag football programs in schools. The game is the catalyst, not the product.
I've been thinking about this in the context of how I see brands try to enter new markets, athletic or otherwise. The ones that show up with a single splashy moment and then disappear get exactly the return you'd expect from a single splashy moment. The ones that treat market entry as a ten-year commitment, that build infrastructure before they need it, that invest in local representation — those are the ones that end up with real brand equity. The NFL figured this out the slow way, through NFL Europe failing, through preseason games that generated attention but no lasting roots, through years of toe-in-toe-out until the owners collectively decided this was a priority and put real money behind a real strategy.
PULL QUOTE: "We don't wanna ever be a traveling circus that shows up and goes away. We wanna be able to build a 365-day-a-year business in that market." — Henry Hodson
The flag football number that stopped me
Henry mentioned, almost in passing, that there are currently 250,000 kids playing flag football in UK schools. Four years ago that number was 30,000. That's roughly an 8x increase in participation in four years, before flag football is even an Olympic sport — it debuts at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
That number matters because it answers the question people always ask about international NFL growth, which is: how do you build a feeder system when your sport requires specialized skills that kids in other countries just aren't developing? You build the feeder system from the bottom, with a version of the game accessible enough that a school with no equipment budget and no coaching expertise can run it at recess. Flag football is the entry drug. The kids who play it become fans. The fans become the market for media rights. The media rights are what the NFL is actually selling.
Osi Umenyiora's work in Africa operates on the same logic, extended further. His argument — one I heard when he first reached out to me about NFL Africa, asked me to support it, and I said yes before I fully understood what I was supporting — is that the pool of elite athletic talent in Africa is enormous and almost entirely untapped by American football. He's been proven right. In roughly three years since that first camp, more than ten players who came through the NFL Africa program are now on practice squads or active rosters. That's not a coincidence. That's what happens when elite athletes encounter a sport for the first time and have access to real coaching and a real pathway.
The pipeline argument is the business argument. More international players in the NFL means more fans in the markets those players come from. More fans means a larger claim on sports media rights in those markets. The UK is second in the world behind the United States in total sports media rights spend. That's the number Hodson referenced when explaining why the UK gets four regular season games a year. It's not charity or sentiment. It's a market.
What I'd actually think about, running this internationally
Three things from this conversation that I keep coming back to, past the football specifics:
- The patient strategy is usually the right one, and most people can't execute it. Henry spent twenty-plus years building toward the role he's in now. The NFL spent decades running failed experiments — NFL Europe, the American Bowl series, preseason games that generated no lasting fan base — before it had the clarity to run a coherent international program. The implication for any business trying to enter a new market is uncomfortable: most market-entry timelines that feel long to a founder are actually too short. Real fan bases, real brand equity, real cultural embeddedness — these things compound slowly. The NFL is now reaping the return on investments made in the mid-1980s, when Channel 4 accidentally gave a sport a primetime platform against Antiques Roadshow and sheep dogs. You don't control when the moment comes. You control whether you were present long enough for it to find you.
- Local representation isn't a diversity initiative. It's a distribution strategy. Every international player who makes an NFL roster is a marketing asset in their home country that no advertising budget can replicate. Efe Obada playing in the NFL means something different to a fan in the UK than any paid promotion ever could. Jordan Mailata in Philadelphia means Australia has a reason to care about the Eagles. The NFL Academy exists, at least in part, because every British player who makes an NFL roster is worth more to the league's UK revenue than a year's worth of highlight packages. If I'm thinking about this outside football — and I am, because this is how I think about every business conversation I have — the question is: who are the people who can represent your product inside a market you're trying to enter? Not paid representatives. Authentic ones. The ones who grew up in that market and earned their way into your industry. They are worth more than you're currently paying for them.
- The uncomfortable move is the one that changes your trajectory. Henry took his family — a wife, an eight-month-old — to a city he didn't love, where he didn't know anyone, for an opportunity he wasn't sure would work out. He said it plainly: he recognized the opportunity even when the situation felt wrong. He spent twelve years in Los Angeles, built a network, learned how to market a sport to people who already loved it, and then brought all of that back to London to apply it to people who are still learning. The sequence only works because he took the uncomfortable step in the middle. I say learn to be comfortable with discomfort all the time — it's probably something I say too easily because I've been in uncomfortable situations my whole career and they've mostly worked out. But Henry's version of it is specific and useful: when you're overseas, when nobody knows you, the pressure to stay safe evaporates. You can take risks you'd never take at home because the downside is just come home. The upside is twelve years of experience you couldn't have gotten any other way.
Henry ended the conversation by saying he'd tell any young person who gets the chance to go live and work overseas to go do it. He said, you will never be sorry that you did it. I believe him. The only version of his career that doesn't end with the GM of NFL UK and Ireland job is the version where he doesn't write the letter at fifteen, or doesn't take the LA job with an eight-month-old at home, or doesn't bet on himself in rooms where a Brit working for an American football league is the last thing anyone expected to see.
He wrote the letter. He took the job. He's running the market.