Who would have thought that the NFL would work in a market where the word “football” meant something entirely different?

The long-term prospects for the English market of American Football seem strong, and the marketing efforts the NFL has put forth in establishing the United Kingdom, and Europe overall, as an additional market have largely been working.

Last year, the NFL boasted an enormous ratings boost for their United Kingdom offerings, with 9.8 million total viewers through four weeks of NFL football in 2016. The trend essentially continued into 2017, with early returns showing similar performance through six weeks — 14 million viewers through six weeks.

Both numbers are misleading; the NFL has been providing more product every year — not all of it live games — for fans in the United Kingdom, and the per-game numbers have remained steady, with big games in London drawing over 350,000 viewers and Red Zone generally getting 50,000 (which is good, twice that of last year).

Most games that play in the market seem to draw an audience of 25 to 30,000 viewers, but evaluating the United Kingdom as one market – like one might for Jacksonville or Dallas-Fort Worth – bodes well for the growth of the game abroad.

The Vikings-Browns game drew 400,000 viewers in the United Kingdom on the widely available BBC2 channel, while the less accessible Sky Sports Action network brings in 20,000 to 50,000 viewers in a typical weekend for their games.

That’s somewhat comparable to the low-end markets in the NFL, where the local Nashville market for the Tennessee Titans draws just shy of a million viewers a week.

The locals in London feel that the NFL and its place in English sporting culture is established, even if it isn’t necessarily as strong as it is for sports native to the country.

“General interest in the United Kingdom is healthy and I think still growing,” said one fan, Matthew Adams, who I was able to talk to a few days before the Vikings-Browns matchup in Twickenham. “The international games continue to sell out. The majority of the crowd in London understand the game well and plenty of its nuances. The level of interest is high in other parts of Europe too, and for every game, there are always plenty of other Europeans who’ve flown into London to watch the NFL live.”

I spoke to an American living in London as well, Corey Velgersdyk. His thoughts on the success of football in the United Kingdom have changed since moving. “When I was living in the United States, I assumed that there was essentially no American football in London outside of the NFL games, which felt like more like a stunt meant to boost bad teams than a legitimate attempt to grow the game overseas. Now it seems that a couple NFL games in London is a sustainable event and although I still wouldn’t call it massively popular, there’s more interest than I originally assumed.”

For Adams, the biggest contributor to that growth has little to do with the NFL’s overt efforts to generate interest in American football, but instead with fantasy football. Adams grew up a Vikings fan by virtue of parents who lived in Minnesota for some time, but has seen American football gain popularity among his friends and colleagues through the appeal of fantasy.

“Fantasy football is much more interesting and fun than fantasy soccer,” he pointed out, “and I think that’s drawn in a lot of casual fans who will often watch Red Zone rather than following a single game or team. I know firsthand that there are a number of people who start with fantasy and get hooked on that, and then subsequently watch more American Football and end up watching it for the enjoyment of the game rather than it being just for their fantasy team.”

Peter Carline, a sportswriter covering the NFL at the Daily Mail, agreed that fantasy football plays a big role in generating interest in American football. “Fantasy football has to be the biggest reason,” he told me shortly after the first Vikings practice in London. Competing with colleagues gets the competitive juices flowing, he told me, and it gives people a lot of reasons to check up on games.

His sense was that the NFL wasn’t far behind the big three sports — soccer, rugby and cricket — in England in terms of popularity, and the fact that football best lends itself to fantasy-style scoring might be a big reason why.

Velgersdyk concurred with fantasy football consensus. “The biggest sources of increased interest in American football have been fantasy football and getting to play the game themselves. American expats working in mixed offices are creating fantasy leagues and roping in some of their British colleagues, which gets them curious about the game. Similarly, I was playing flag football in Hyde Park last week and although just over half the players there were American, the rest were Brits and one Frenchman who all started to follow football after having experienced playing it in rec leagues”

That’s not the only source of newfound fandom among Brits, but it is a big one. Expanding access is also large. Though GamePass abroad has been fraught with technical issues as they have switched to a new platform, it’s been crucial to letting fans follow their favorite teams live or in replay. Beyond that, more highlight shows and games have been broadcast in the United Kingdom.

“Sky TV shows three games on Sunday, as well as the Thursday and Monday games and Red Zone,” said the fan I accosted to tell me about the NFL. “To watch more or follow a specific team you can subscribe to Game Pass which allows you to easily watch more, NFL network shows, the draft and so on. There are some pubs and bars that show games, but the vast majority will watch games at home. Overall, as long as you’re happy to pay a bit, it’s actually really easy to watch games over here, and a far cry from trying to listen to KFAN on dial-up internet as I used to do about 15 years ago.”

The fact that the early games in the United States match up with a 6 p.m. kickoff time in London really helps with watchability, and is an advantage the NFL will continue to have. The passion fans in the United Kingdom and across Europe have is genuine.

Velgersdyk didn’t have much issue finding football games either. “A few sports bars will carry the games, and bookies and casinos almost always do as well. The presence of the latter has actually been one of the most apparent differences living in London as compared to the United States. Bookmakers have shops all around the city, and they always have a few TVs covering sports from all around the world. There are a handful of casinos in town too, and they also run bookmaking operations and cover the games. Probably not where you want to watch football all season long, but it could work if you were desperate.”

Seated behind me at Twickenham stadium were a group of three Germans, two of whom were enthusiastically explaining to the other the rules and storylines of the game developing in front of them. It wasn’t simply knowing the down-and-distance rules, but the differences in role for Linval Joseph and Tom Johnson on the Vikings defense, as well as why defensive holding and pass interference are different penalties.

Neither they nor I could explain catch rules.

The big question is whether or not the NFL should permanently host a team in London. Speaking to fans on the other side of the pond, it’s clear that the NFL’s United Kingdom operation is pushing this opportunity.

But it’s an open question about whether eight games is even sustainable in the UK. Right now, the NFL is proud to announce sellouts for each of the games in their international series, but official ticket sales are never completely reliable. While it wouldn’t have been easy for a late-coming fan to find tickets from scalpers for the Vikings-Browns game, it was evidently much easier the previous week when the Arizona Cardinals took on the Los Angeles Rams.

Though the NFL announced a sellout for that game as well, those who attended the game told me there were a decent number of empty seats available.

That brings up another issue: many of the fans who attended the Vikings-Browns matchup also attended every other game in London. It’s not clear that they would stretch their dollars out over eight games like they have for four.

Adams thinks that an effort like that could undermine the overall goal of sustaining interest in football in the region. “Eight different games is a lot to ask to sell out year after year when there’s no consistency to the teams you see,” he told me. “I think that if they were to move to eight games, and that were to happen for a few years without there being much sign of a team moving here, then you’d inevitably see a dropoff and games wouldn’t all sell out. That would take the wind out of the sails of the entire effort, and possibly result in something like a tail off of the London centric push, resulting in a couple of international games each year that move around Europe and the rest of the world.”

Everyone I talked to about a potential eight-game push shared Adams’ cautiousness, including Carline.

Adams went on with regards to the likelihood of a London-based NFL team. “I certainly don’t think it’s inevitable London get a team, but I think the league is still very keen to try to make it happen,” he said. “It looked like the Jaguars were being lined up for the move, but that appears a little less likely now with their commitment to Jacksonville. The games continue to sell out and there has only been an expansion and growth of the international series in the last ten years. Logistics, particularly potential playoff logistics, still make it difficult, and competitiveness is a major question mark, which isn’t helped by all the one-sided games we’ve seen here recently. I think overall, there haven’t been any clear signals over here that the NFL is reducing its efforts to attempt to move towards a European franchise. So whilst I still think it’ll be very difficult to make it a reality, I do think it’s a realistic possibility.”

The NFL’s partners in the United Kingdom are very enthusiastic about a potential London team and seem to push the possibility beyond what might seem reasonable to outside observers. Neil Reynolds, the studio host for Sky Sports’ NFL coverage, told the New York Daily News last year that London is already capable of supporting a team with no need to wait for further growth.

“You’ll hear people say we’re still three years away from being ready for a team,” he told the Daily News last October. “But I think we’re already there.”

Velgersdyk, like Adams and Carline, doesn’t share the vision of the future that Reynolds does. “I don’t see [a London team] being successful here, at least not yet,” he said. “While the NFL games that are here are well-attended, it’s because they are special events. The people living in London that go to those games are going to watch football, not cheer on the specific teams (unless by chance their team happens to be one of the visitors playing). Growing a fan base that would support the London Knickerbockers would be a herculean task in a city and country doesn’t have widespread youth leagues and several popular team sports to pull attention and dollars away from American football.”

In my conversation with Carline about the potential for a London team, we compared the difficulty of creating a London team with that of the Los Angeles Chargers and (soon-to-be) Las Vegas Raiders. Most fans of the NFL in those cities had already picked a team, and in the case of the Raiders, live in a town built on tourism and transients — with people who bring their NFL loyalties to other teams with them when they move.

So too with London, where Carline argued that hometown pride wouldn’t be enough to sustain interest in a local team. “There are more fans of the Bears, Dolphins and 49ers here than anything else,” he explained. Those teams were exciting in the 1980s when the NFL was first airing in the United Kingdom, and if fans weren’t going to give up on those teams when they stumbled in the contemporary era of NFL play, they probably wouldn’t for a London team that wouldn’t be competitive for a number of reasons.

Carline was more than happy to list the reasons that such a team wouldn’t be competitive, but the first one is obvious. “Who would want to play here?” Isolated from friends, family and a social safety net that they would recognize, players would be hesitant and best and openly resistant at worst at the idea of choosing to — or in the case of draftees, being forced to — play in London.

Not only that, Carline rattled off arguments about income taxes – much higher in the UK than even the high-tax states of New York, Minnesota and California – playoff logistics and the enormous home field advantage involved on either side of the field for any team in a game featuring a London franchise.

What Carline said matched what Adams said when asked the same question, and it seems clear that these issues are well-known among enthusiasts of American football in the United Kingdom. Regardless, the league is pushing the possibility of a London franchise, so those problems will have to be addressed.

American football is a difficult game to teach, and it runs counter to the flow of other games with its stop-start nature. It has a culture of specialized roles and prides itself on how difficult it is to understand the finer nuances of the game. The league is happy to tamp down more flamboyant personalities and has difficulty selling its most popular players when their faces are hidden by helmets throughout the game.

Despite all of that, it seems like American football has established itself as part of the sporting culture — however small — in the United Kingdom.