Press your ear to the ground and you may be able to hear the rumble, that now distinct sound of hulking Americans with big plays and even bigger shoulder pads coming across the Atlantic. Yes, it is that time again – when summer waves goodbye and the NFL says hello, with Wembley Stadium again the destination for a gridiron invasion.

This is the eighth successive year that regular-season NFL games will take place at the home of English football and the first time that three contests will form part of the league’s international series, with the Oakland Raiders and Miami Dolphins getting it all under way on 28 September before the Atlanta Falcons face the Detroit Lions on 26 October and the Dallas Cowboys meet the Jacksonville Jaguars on 9 November.

More than 225,000 tickets have been sold for the games, with close to 35,000 of those season tickets. That, for many, is proof of just how successful the NFL’s annual visit to London has become, with this year’s sales coming on the back of the 83,559 crowd that watched the San Francisco 49ers thrash the Jaguars 42-10 in the second of the two international series matches played last October.

As the crowds continue to flock and the number of matches and teams appearing at Wembley increase – Oakland, Atlanta and Dallas are making their competitive debuts in the UK this year – there rises an obvious and not entirely new question: how long until there is a UK team, or “franchise”, in the NFL? According to Dallas’s owner, Jerry Jones, it a case of when and not if. “I think it is going to get done,” he said.

“I sense an increasing interest [in the sport] and the ability [in the UK] to attract fans. This is incrementally a new market, there are new eyeballs there. In Canada we already have a high percentage of the television market that are NFL fans and the first thing we had to do in the UK was build a fanbase, which is what these [international] games have done and are doing. I like the lay of the land.”

It is no surprise to hear Jones talk excitedly about “new markets”. This, after all, is a man who during his 25 years in charge of the Cowboys has relentlessly sought to make them the most noticeable – or as the 71-year-old puts it, “relevant” - brand in the NFL, with his grandest move in this regard being to build a $1.2bn home for the Cowboys in the city of Arlington, 20 miles west of Dallas. Positioned directly opposite the Texas Rangers’ far more traditional and modest-looking home – the Rangers are a baseball team – the AT&T Stadium looks like a giant spaceship that has crash-landed on Earth.

But Jones is not alone in talking up the possibility of a UK-based NFL team. As Alistair Kirkwood, managing director of NFL UK, admits, “work has been done internally” on planning for such a side, almost certainly based in London, with the international series an ongoing means to see if there is an appetite here for season-long competition.

“If someone told me 10 years ago that figures of the calibre of Jerry Jones would be talking seriously about a UK side, I would’ve been blown away,” said Kirkwood. “There is real excitement about the possibility of a franchise, especially in light of the crowds we are getting for the international games. It is something that would provide fans here with a Ryder Cup experience week in, week out.

“But we are also wary about not doing anything that messes up the NFL. The season is a compressed one with very few games, so it would be hugely damaging to any side if they lost a fixture on the back of having to travel to the UK to compete. Overall, the international games have shown that this is not a major problem – the New York Giants won the first game in 2007 and went on to win the Super Bowl the following year.”

Jones is also adamant that regular cross-Atlantic travelling is not a “major hurdle”. He said: “I don’t want to diminish the importance of our players getting a good rest but they are young and used to jumping on a plane and going for five or six hours from coast to coast. Also we [the NFL owners] have looked at several ways you could combine games to incorporate a London franchise. For instance, a team travelling to the UK could first play a game on the east coast, thereby reducing their journey distance.”

To some extent we have been here before with the London Monarchs, who were established in 1991 as part of the World League of American Football. Largely made up of American development players, the Monarchs won the very first WLAF World Bowl, beating Barcelona Dragons 21-0 in front of more than 60,000 at the old Wembley Stadium. By 1998, however, they found themselves playing to crowds of less than 6,000 people at venues such as the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre and were soon shut down.

“The Monarchs were part of a farm league created just before the boom of pay-TV, which saw major investment put into the top end of sport. It quickly became clear that the wrong bet had been placed by attempting a bottom-up approach,” said Kirkwood. “We accept now that if a UK/London team is to work it has to go in at the highest level, which the NFL undoubtedly is. It’s not just the biggest sport brand in the US but also the biggest entertainment brand.”

To be competitive in the NFL, a UK-based side would still have to draft American players, something Jack Crawford, the Cowboys’ London-born defensive end, feels is easier said than done. “I don’t know how you could take someone who grew up in America, went to an American college, and just draft them over to England to work and live in a whole different culture,” he said. “It’s definitely easier for a Brit to come over here and adapt than the other way around. Americans love the idea of living in England but they think it’s like in the movies. I tell them it’s not like that – they have to get used to lots of rain.”

It may well pour when the NFL’s established big beasts again descend on these shores, and as thousands watch the likes of the Raiders and Cowboys compete, in flesh and on TV (Channel Four along with Sky are showing live coverage of all three games), the feeling that there is more to come will only grow. Traditionalists may squirm at the thought, but Wembley could one day host more touchdowns than goals.

Sky Sports shows live games from the NFL every Thursday night and Sunday evening including the Wembley International Series as part of an autumn of sport

• This article was amended on 19 September 2014. An earlier version gave the attendance at the first WLAF World Bowl as “more than 40,000” and referred to “Superbowl” instead of “Super Bowl”.