Thanks for the responses Nischal and James. Nischal, you touch on an interesting age old question i.e What drives the success of national sports teams/brands? At a conceptual level, some of the drivers of this success may also be relevant to the international expansion of a domestic sport. James, you're right that the success of the international series appears to have given momentum to the international expansion of the NFL. Another researcher who is also interested in this topic has suggested the adoption of an ecosystem view to encapsulate all the individual drivers and dynamics we may uncover.

As it stands, we have a team of four researchers who have expressed an interest in this topic. I welcome you to the team and look forward to working with you. My plan is for us to really engage with the research in the second half of the year. In the meantime we can continue to share thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks

Gentlemen,

Just a quick note to let you know that I am the 4th researcher Eldrede mentioned above interested in collaborating with the team.

Besides being a huge American football fan, I am the father of twin daughters that are former NCAA Division 1 Volleyball athletes - so the love of sport runs deep in my heart.

In closing, I look forward to our collaboration, especially around the topic area of how strategic partners, alliances, networks and their resulting ecosystems can prepare an organization for success.

Regards,

Rich McDonnell

email: [email protected] 

Even I'm interested. I Support James idea to include the expansion of the NFL into Europe. My base is in Germany so maybe we could compare the two European "Players" (UK + DE) across dimensions to see what works and what not in Terms of American Football's internationalization.

There has been some general papers on the internationalization of sports as well as on American Football in Europe. I extracted the bibliographical information of the main pieces of work from Europe's biggest sport science database provided by the Federal Institute of Sport Sciences Germany. You can access the database free of charge via

www.bisp-datenbanken.de

Maybe this information helps at the beginning of your project.

http://www.bisp-datenbanken.de

Hi, Robin

Thanks for that. We will take a look and see if we can use these resources to inform our literature review and theoretical framework. As Frithiof and James suggest it's increasingly making a lot of sense to view some of the dynamics from a UK/DE perspective.

Once again, thanks

Eldrede

Hi, Colleagues

Just checking to see if you are still interested in examining the 'internationalization of sport'. I apologize for not being able to stick to the timeline I had suggested. However, I'm quite excited about this subject matter given some notable developments over the last few months, in particular

1) The early success of former Aussie rugby player Jarryd Hayne, during his stint with the San Francisco 49ers, and the effect it had on the relevance of the NFL down under.

2)  The 'legends cricket tour' featuring yesteryear superstars, playing games across the USA.

Let me know if you are still interested so we can consolidate some of the ideas and resources you have already contributed, with a view to starting work at the beginning of next year.

Thanks

Hi, James

Thanks for that. I look forward to working with you.

Regards

Hi

I live in Iran and I work in sports marketing. It will be interesting for me to know why the sport of American football in Iran is not so popular

NFL should also be played in Kenya when we have winter in US.