In American parlance, the Minnesota Vikings suck. They’re an under-achieving American football team, consistently finding inventive new ways to embarrass themselves. I fell hopelessly in love with them when awake at an irresponsible hour on a Friday morning in England. They were losing heavily and one of their players was trading blows with an opponent. The Viking had his helmet knocked off but carried on fighting, despite the fact that he was punching his opponent’s polymer headgear while being walloped back on his exposed head. Brave, farcical and stupid. They reminded me of my non-American football team, QPR. They were my guys.

Pledging my loyalty to them was a terrible idea. This is what I think as I sit among 52,000 other miserable fans watching them lose. In the space of 10 seconds they contrive to miss an easy chance to score three points and manage to concede six instead. There is furious, morose booing. A middle-aged lady nearby sports a dozen bracelets, a bow tie in her hair and feather earrings, all in the team’s fetching combination of purple and yellow. She puts down her deafening Nordic horn. “Coach!” she screams. “I believed in you, you let me down! I thought you had some balls!” A chap who has seen enough is heading for the exit wearing a hoodie decorated with the words “This team makes me drink”. I know the feeling.

I’m part of the second wave of Brits to be seduced by the National Football League (NFL), which gained a foothold here in the 1980s when televised for the first time on Channel Four.

The sport has maintained a healthy fan base in this country, which led to a league game being played outside the USA for the first time in 2007 at Wembley Stadium. There have been nine since, and this season Wembley hosted three. A quarter of a million people bought tickets, with the league’s best-supported team the Dallas Cowboys among the visitors. The popularity of the sport and a huge catchment area means London is expected to get an NFL team of its own within 10 years. It’s unlikely that watching them will compare with the authentic American experience.

Earlier in the season, which concludes on Sunday with the Super Bowl, I headed for the eastern and more interesting half of the Midwest, the Great Lakes region. It’s home to plenty of glorious scenery, six ocean-sized lakes and, crucially, the same number of American Football teams. Plenty about seeing my Minnesota Vikings for the first time was familiar from years of loyal soccer attendance.

The haphazard community spirit of wearing your team’s colours among other people doing the same, the song-singing at strangers before the game, losing, often heavily.

Just as much was fantastically alien. Sofa-based American football fandom cannot prepare you for the tangible fright the first time you see two gigantic men torpedoing themselves in unison at a smaller fella who’s unlucky enough to be holding the ball. The sound of an NFL stadium is an inversion of British football, with a respectful silence when the home team is attacking and total raucousness on de-fense, a cacophony of ferocious booing, unspecific guttural noises and piercing whistles that resonate brain nerves. Movement is all around you in the stands and gangways, people passing dollars along their rows to the mobile beer vendors, then having their drinks passed in the opposite direction.

The setting for this sporting sensory overload was Minneapolis, a pretty city filled with pretty people that know a dizzying number of ways to fry cheese.



The pretty city of Minneapolis

The day before the game I took a tour on board a Segway, those electricity-powered wheeled platforms which should carry an official government warning for people averse to looking idiotic. It took advantage of some of the USA’s most cycle-friendly streets to skirt then cross the Mississippi which divides the city from its twin St Paul, taking in a tidy downtown and parks filled with wholesome joggers. The state’s stringent refusal to apply sales tax clothing also ensures the Mall of America in nearby Bloomington remains a draw for weekend visitors from as far afield as Tokyo. It’s a maximalist version of Kent’s Bluewater, but Levi’s cost about a third as much.

It’s a far cry from Detroit, whose Lions I saw play the previous Monday night. Most NFL games take place on a Sunday, and being chosen for national TV broadcast on a Monday evening is a big deal. T-shirts were on sale outside the stadium commemorating the fact that the game was being screened as part of ESPN’s Monday Night Football programme. Hard to imagine that happening for Aston Villa v Stoke, with analysis from Jamie Carragher.

The Lions’ Ford Field is an extravagant exercise in dominating space. Appropriately given its sponsor, it’s like being inside the world’s biggest garage. Lions fans were rowdier than any other I came across, matching the stubborn intensity of everyone’s who’s stuck with the city of Detroit as its population has fallen from nearly two million to around 700,000.

An ardent fan of the Detroit Lions watches his team (Picture: Getty Images)

As a minor act of revenge for the automotive industry flouncing off to the Far East, a conference centre owned by General Motors won’t let you into its car park in any vehicles that have been constructed abroad. You’ll park on the other side of the road, sir. On the naughty step.

Among the well-documented abandonment issues of the city there’s plenty to enjoy. The queasy beauty of the Heidelberg Project, a multiple-block outdoor art space of houses decorated wonkily with polka dots, salvaged dolls and faded colour paint swirls. The Motown museum is tiny but packs a potent emotional punch if the music made there means anything to you. The Cadieux Cafe is a welcoming Belgian restaurant 15 minutes from downtown with soul-heavy karaoke of an extremely high standard, and the nation’s only Feather Bowling alley. It’s basically lawn bowls, but played on a dirt track with a feather stuck into the ground instead of a jack.

Even without a feather bowling facility, no city has a higher sport content in its DNA than Chicago. The purpose of my trip (“Sport. Lots of sport.”) was even enough to prompt some honest-to-goodness pleasantries from the stern passport control mob at O’Hare. Chicago inhabitants are especially obsessed with NFL.



Soldier Field, home to the Chicago Bears (Picture: City of Chicago)

In the queue to stand on a glass ledge at the top of Willis (née Sears) Tower the man behind me excitedly tells his friend that Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers only threw one completed pass to the right side of the field in the previous night’s season opener. During an architectural boat tour we pass a grandmother pushing a baby girl in a pram, both wearing Chicago Bears t-shirts. On a stroll through the gorgeous, leafy Lakeview area north of the city centre on a Saturday night every TV visible through apartment windows was emitting that night’s college game.

Soldier Field, home to the Bears, was an ideal introduction to live NFL. Reassuringly steep stands, plenty of space and toilets that would shame most British workplaces, let alone stadiums. It’s also where I make it to a pre-game tailgate party, a noble American tradition with the aim of maximising pre-game drunkenness. Fans turn up hours before kick-off and pitch tables behind their cars, fill them with an array of hot dogs, pizza and mayonnaise-heavy salads, then begin the boisterousness, like an unreconstructed afternoon at Ascot.

Footballs arc over your head, muscular rawk music plays and the whole thing smells of overly-seasoned grilled meat. Some extravagant cocktail drinking is taking place, but disappointingly the overwhelming booze choice is Bud Light. In fairness, given that an NFL games takes more than three hours, a weak beer is a wise move.

A word too for Milwaukee, which is the (American) definition of “neat”. There’s no football team in the city, but it’s a good stop if you’re on your way to see the Green Bay Packers a couple of hours up the road. There’s an embarrassment of pleasantness in the historic Third Ward, an intimidating beer list at the Benelux Cafe, even more wine across the road at a delightful covered market, brewery tours where the guides seem to be drunker than the patrons, an art museum with flapping wings and a museum serving as a black stone shrine to local company Harley Davidson, which somehow made motorcycles interesting to me.



By the shores of Lake St Clair in Detroit

The English dialogue around American sport usually points out a perceived lack of authenticity. You’re told when to cheer, the games are artificially high-scoring, the fixed smile on every cheerleader’s face is frightening. I won’t dispute the last point, but after three distinctly different NFL games the idea of snarking at its traditions seems as parochial as a loudmouth drawling on about the dullness of “sawker”. The Great Lakes is where cynicism goes to die. And it may be the infectious spirit of American hyperbole taking effect, but its people are the kindest and most polite in the world. At least until the game starts.

Essentials

Vacations to America (01582 469 777; vacationstoamerica.com) can offer return flights from London, car hire for nine nights (with a $100/ £67 one-way fee plus tax payable locally), and 12-night stay, including three nights in Chicago, two nights in Detroit, two nights in Milwaukee, two nights in Bloomington and three nights in Minneapolis. Total cost per person of £1,345.

See greatlakesusa.co.uk for more information the Great Lakes region or call 08456 020 574.

Read also a guide to how to buy NFL tickets