Claus Elming, known as the “John Madden of Denmark,” played a key role in bringing American football to the Scandinavian country. PHOTOGRAPH BY LARS E ANDREASEN / HER OG NU VIA GETTY

Last Saturday, on a cool afternoon in northern Denmark, the Guns N' Roses power ballad "Sweet Child o' Mine" played on the streets outside Viborg Stadium as fans of American football began to tailgate, in a subdued, Scandinavian manner, before the championship game in the country's top American football league. The Triangle Razorbacks, from Vejle, faced the Søllerød Gold Diggers, from the suburbs of Copenhagen, in Mermaid Bowl XXVII. The Mermaid Bowl was named after the fairy tale written in the nineteenth century by Hans Christian Andersen. (You may be familiar with the Disney version.) Though there is a literary football team in America—Poe's Baltimore Ravens—it's hard to imagine the Patriots and the Seahawks squaring off in, say, the Moby-Dick Bowl. But Denmark is happy to mix high culture with low, not to mention Danish with American.

Inside the stadium, Van Halen's "Jump" blared as the teams raced onto the field. Since 2008, the Razorbacks and the Gold Diggers have faced each other in the championship six times. (Parity is not currently a feature of the Danish version of American football.) The Razorbacks won in dramatic fashion in both 2011 and 2012, the last time the two teams squared off on this stage, and they entered Saturday's game undefeated.

On the first play of the game, the Gold Diggers, wearing black and gold, did something rarely seen in stateside Super Bowls: quarterback Morten Forsbøl—who threw for eleven hundred and eighty-four yards and eleven touchdowns in 2015—tossed a lateral to Thomas Johansen, who found an open receiver down the field. But the team failed to score. The Razorbacks got the ball back, only to do something else unusual by N.F.L. standards: snapping the ball over their punter, Torben Atkinson Jørgensen, who fumbled it while trying to run out of the end zone. As quickly as you can say "General-clothes-press-inspector-head-superintendent-Goat-legs"—a character in Andersen's “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep”_—_it was seven to nothing, Gold Diggers.

Ultimately, though, the team from Søllerød couldn't stop the running attack of the Razorbacks' Geoffrey Lewis, and the pride of Vejle won the trophy yet again. Champagne was sprayed. More American rock songs were played. The twenty-seven hundred and fifty-four spectators—filling only a quarter of the stadium, but still a record crowd for American football in Denmark—roared. Meanwhile, most Danish fans of American football were at home, waiting for the genuine article: Sunday night N.F.L. football.

American football has never excited Europe much. The sport is more popular in Mexico, India, and China—though its popularity in other countries pales, of course, in comparison with its popularity at home, where nearly two-thirds of the population describe themselves as “fans.” N.F.L. Europe was a well-chronicled failure. But in Denmark, a country of about five and a half million, nearly a quarter of the population follows the National Football League, according to the (possibly optimistic) Danish American Football Federation. Percentage-wise, that's on par with Brazil and greater than Spain, Australia, and England—where three N.F.L. regular-season games will take place this year—according to a recent survey of global N.F.L. fans from thirty-two countries. (The survey, which focused on larger countries, did not include Denmark.)

N.F.L. games appear live on network television every Sunday and Monday in Denmark. Due to the time difference, early-afternoon games are viewed in the evening, while the eight-thirty games are broadcast at two-thirty in the morning. Nonetheless, as many as a hundred thousand Danes tune in to regular-season games. That number increases to roughly a half million for the Super Bowl, which is screened at some movie theatres, where fans can watch the game while drinking Budweiser.

How did this happen? A pair of onetime exchange students had a lot to do with it. In the late summer of 1985, a sixteen-year-old named Claus Elming got off a plane from Denmark and set foot in Minnesota for the first time. He would be living with a family of strangers in the small town of Prior Lake, twenty miles southwest of Minneapolis. Like many Danish kids, he played soccer and had never seen an American football game. But the family he'd been placed with was, as he recently put it to me, "football-crazed."

Elming's host-brother took him to watch a football game on his third day in the States: a Prior Lake Lakers high-school varsity scrimmage. "I thought the gladiator-look of the football players was quite crazy,” Elming said, “but also really cool." At home in Prior Lake, every Sunday after church, they watched the Minnesota Vikings—a team name that resonated, conveniently, with Elming's Scandinavian roots—and they played football with neighborhood kids all through the winter. By the time he left the States a year later, Elming had been transformed. "I brought home what my host brother had taught me," he said. "I was a football kid who had never played a down of organized, full-contact football, but I was determined to introduce this sport to as many people as possible."

At the time, American football was all but nonexistent in Denmark. There was only one team, according to Elming—the now-defunct Copenhagen Vikings—and they had to play Swedish teams to play at all. Football games had never been shown on Danish television. "It may as well have been figure skating," Elming said. In late 1987, when he was eighteen, Elming founded the Herning Hawks—the third football club team in Denmark—with two other former American exchange students. "I had absolutely no plan at the time," Elming said. "I was a kid who loved football and just wanted to play it, bring it to Denmark."

There was only one television network in Denmark in 1987, Danmarks Radio. That year, for the first time, it broadcast highlights from the Super Bowl. The legendary Danish sports commentator Claus Borre—who normally covered swimming, Formula One, and boxing—was chosen to describe the game between the Denver Broncos and the New York Giants. "He read John Elway’s name as ‘Eiway’—with an ‘i’ instead of an ‘l’—and since nobody had ever heard of the guy in Denmark, we thought for many years that his name was John Eiway," Peter Sloth, a Danish sports journalist, recalled. A few years later, a Nintendo video game called John Elway’s Quarterback appeared, and, Sloth said, "everybody in Denmark thought that they’d spelled the name wrong!"

TV 2 was established in 1988, breaking Danmarks Radio's monopoly and, soon, becoming the first network in the country to broadcast a full N.F.L. game: Super Bowl XXIII, between Joe Montana's 49ers and Boomer Esiason's Bengals. That same year, Elming moved to Aarhus to study, where he also founded the Aarhus Tigers. Soon, club games were a novelty subject on the nightly news. Early video clips show players using American expressions, like "Let's Go!," to get into the spirit of the sport. Danish competitors spiked the ball and danced after scoring a touchdown, imitating their American counterparts. Super Bowl parties were also successfully replicated.

In the nineties, Elming played wide receiver for the Herning Hawks, the Aarhus Tigers, and the Fredericia Jets; he later coached all three, as well as the Avedøre Monarchs and the Danish under-nineteen national team. Owing to both his knowledge of American football and his good looks, Elming was eventually asked to anchor TV 2 Sport—essentially Denmark's ESPN—and soon became known as the "John Madden of Denmark." Known to wear purple underwear, an intimate homage to his Minnesota Vikings, Elming is also referred to as "N.F.L.ming."