What it Means to this Brit that the Packers are Coming to London

A UK Packers fan, Ian Caleb give us his view from the other side of the pond:

To be a UK fan of the NFL is to send your passion across the pond to cities you may never visit and teams who might only exist at strange hours on strange TV channels. A regular member of the 3am crew, you weren’t told from a young age that your family supported the Pack and that was that. No one pointed at your state proudly and expected you to bleed green and gold for your home soil and your forefathers. Your schoolfriends didn’t try to right the wrong of 4th and 26 as you traded three Robert Ferguson stickers for a Mike McKenzie. You had to discover the game yourself, maybe tripping over some glitz-laden highlight reel and, before you knew it, heading down a dark path that led to watching preseason games or pretending we know that free safety prospect from Clemson was a reach – or what a Clemson is for that matter.

Okay, we may be more 4-4-2 than 4-3, more tighthead props than tight ends. We might rely on pressing the “Ask Madden” button instead of knowing how a team can attack a Cover 3. Less football, more handegg, am I right? But our passion comes from knowing we chose this sport, and we chose this team, when there was absolutely no reason to do either. It’s the passion of knowing we love the game not out of habit or habitat, but because our love meant we’ve always made the effort to go the extra mile when the sport is so many miles away.

When the London games began in 2007, our hopes of the pride of Wisconsin gracing the Wembley turf were high. Yes, we’d stomach the lopsided scores. The Cleo Lemon bowl. The parade of teams who filled their own stadiums with tarpaulins, not people. The “home games” where 31 sets of jerseys cheered every score (sorry Texans fan). All in the hope we’d get our team on that field one day, a few dozen metres away instead of thousands of miles. And we waited with hope, even as we slowly discovered the home games were too sacrosanct and away games too lucrative.

The news that, after 15 years of waiting, we would finally get our turn probably saw thousands of tiny manic celebrations up and down the country. Imagine someone fist pumping at a petrol station while his mates discussed the Chelsea penalty. A vicar moonwalking down an empty aisle. Me, having to explain to my boss why I was so damned passionate about that spreadsheet. Knowing full well that we might be celebrating on our own, but we were also celebrating with so many others who had gone that extra mile for all these years.

I hope the fans who feel they are losing a home game can get behind the fact this will be no awkward exhibition in front of an indifferent crowd equipped with inferior hotdogs. I hope when they see the full throated, full hearted support the Packers get here and will get in the stadium, they’ll realise giving up the ninth home game is in part about appreciating the privilege of seeing eight games a year in the first place. I’m prepped to scrap and scrape for a ticket and I’m sure thousands of UK fans are saying the same thing tonight, because even with the international obligations these days this might be the one chance we get.

So on a day of those thousands of celebrations thousands of miles away, please don’t tirade on the twitters, grumble on the ‘gram or flood facebook. Instead raise a glass, heck raise a pint, to the fans who can finally make the pilgrimage to see the best team on the planet. After all, if we want Green Bay to be World Champions, then surely we want to world to have the chance to champion them.

– Ian Caleb