If there is anything Britain still knows how to do it is turn a profit from sport. The English Premier League ('soccer' again) is one of our most successful business enterprises
That's great, but if I'm not mistaken, all of the teams in that league are located in England and Wales, which is an area of about 150,000 square miles, and the two teams in that league that are farthest from each other are located only about 323 miles from each other. Right? That's less than one tenth of the distance that a London NFL team would have to travel for its CLOSEST road game.
if London is seen as a place to turn a profit (and it is) then a team will come. Players will sign contracts. What else are they going to do, return to their engineering careers? Go back to playing cello for the New York Philharmonic?
Uh...no. Unless they're borderline players, they'll sign with one of the other 30 teams in the NFL. In other words, the marquee players aren't going to want to play in such a remote location, which means the team will be terrible. How much interest will a perennial 2-14 team maintain?
Time zones are irrelevant. Look what is happening with Spain's 'La Liga' now, teams are going to be playing 1 game a year in the US because of money.
Time zones are not irrelevant. That's why the NFL's collective bargaining agreement with its players provides that the teams that play the games in London get their bye week the following week. I have no idea what "La Liga" is, but playing one game a year in a remote geographic location is a far cry from having a single team in a remote location that plays ALL of its road games no less than 3,275 miles away.
American football players are on peanuts compared to what they could be making if they tapped into the British and European market.
That's just an absurd statement. Are you suggesting football would eclipse or rival soccer if the NFL expanded to Europe? I assume not. How much does the average cricket player make compared to the average NFL player? You're aware, are you not, that there was an "American football" league in Europe for most of the 1990s and 2000s and that that league folded after an average loss of $30 million per season?
Enough to support a division of teams (four at least)? That's how you do it. Have a division, or even a league (four divisions) where the teams "interplay", with occasional trips to the North American continent, as opposed to having one disadvantaged team that has to do all the travel. Travel itself isn't bad; the Seahawks are a successful organization. But it has to be more balanced; having a set of teams in the UK/EU is a way of doing that.
Agree. This is the only way it would work (however, as cramx3 noted, a 36+ team league would be too bloated).